What started as a Super Bowl ad about finding lost dogs ended in a multicity contract termination for Flock, not because its technology was featured in the ad, but because of growing public sentiment as a result.
In a controversial yet viral ad for Amazon’s Ring that premiered during the Super Bowl, a user uploaded a photo of a lost dog so participating homes in Ring’s Search Party feature can scan their footage to find that lost dog. What started as a heartwarming story of reunification culminated in millions of Americans shocked at how “creepy” the tech was, and how it could be manipulated into nefarious purposes, such as tracking individuals and finding their current whereabouts.
The ad portrayed Ring’s Search Party feature, notably different than the Community Requests feature Ring and Flock had initially partnered on to integrate technologies. Ring terminated its contract with Flock Safety, an AI-powered license reader used by (or, formerly for some) police precincts across the country. Flock, a company that sells networks of roadside cameras and software to police departments, businesses, and neighborhoods to identify vehicles and feed that data into searchable law-enforcement databases, is active in more than 5,000 U.S. cities. The software scans license plates and uses integrated video tools to log plates, time, and location, then alerts police when a vehicle matches a “hot list” or is linked to an investigation.
But Ring’s Super Bowl commercial, regardless of the fact it featured Ring technology and not Flock’s, made millions wary of the software company’s large camera and data network, and how it could be easily repurposed to not only scan license plates but something more.
“Flock’s intended integration with Community Requests has been cancelled,” a Ring spokesperson told Fortune. “This integration was never live, and no videos were ever shared between these services. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration.”
This move occurred amid escalating concerns regarding privacy, civil liberties, and the role of private tech companies in federal law enforcement activities.
A spokesperson for Flock told Fortune: “We didn’t know the Super Bowl ad was coming, and we didn’t have anything to do with it.”
Instead, Flock and Ring agreed the integration to improve Community Requests would prove difficult with current resources, the Flock spokesperson added.
Now cities are similarly following suit and cancelling their own contracts with the software company. Cities from Flagstaff, Ariz., to Windsor, Conn., have joined more than 30 other cities across the country that have either suspended, if not fully terminated, their partnership with Flock.
Since the beginning of 2025, at least 30 cities have canceled their contracts with Flock, including Eugene, Ore.; Hillsborough, N.C.; and Santa Cruz, Calif. Flagstaff Mayor Becky Daggett told NPR “community outrage” made it clear the technology would not be received well, even as she had high hopes to use the technology.
“In the end, it was just clear that this wasn’t going to be a technology that was going to be well received or that we could continue to use,” Daggett told NPR.
“I think that the mayor said it almost better than I could say it myself,” the Flock spokesperson told Fortune. “Communities that are removing Flock are just doing themselves a disservice, without addressing the underlying concerns that are actually at issue,” the spokesperson added, saying the company has put guardrails in place to work with communities to address any privacy concerns they might have.
“Flock is able to configure our system so that it can align with any community or any state’s local laws and local values,” the spokesperson said, referencing the company’s work in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., in which the two cities have regulation preventing license-plate readers from working with immigration enforcement—something with which Flock was already aligned. “We’ve actually hard-coded guardrails that prevent that. So we have a filter that would block any immigration related searches that is automatically applied across California.”
In a statement to Fortune, the City of Santa Cruz said Flock had notified the city its system architecture was in violation of two state bills “that unintentionally allowed law enforcement agencies outside of California to search data from agencies across the country, including Santa Cruz.” The bills, SB34 and SB54, relate to the security and privacy procedures of automatic license plate reader operators in the state, and the notification to federal authorities when a person who is arrested for a violation of a controlled substance is not a U.S. citizen.
Flock informed Santa Cruz that the violations stopped on Feb. 11, adding the company implemented system changes ” to prevent recurrence, including deactivating the National Search Tool for California agencies, revoking the ability for California agencies to create one-on-one data-sharing relationships with agencies outside of California, and adding filters to block searches related to ICE, Border Patrol, immigration, or similar terms.” But, “ultimately, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the City’s contract with Flock,” the Santa Cruz official said in a statement. The city had eight automatic license plate reader cameras that are no longer in use.
Other cities echo Flock’s sentiment. “Over the past several years, the Windsor Police Department has had a cooperative relationship with Flock Safety,” an assistant to the town manager of Windsor, Conn., told Fortune. “The department has utilized the technology as one of many tools intended to assist in investigations and locate stolen vehicles and missing persons. While the cameras have contributed valuable investigative information, they have always represented just one component of our overall public safety strategy.”
However, major metropolitan departments have begun to push back on Flock’s standard terms. The Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts ACLU demanded changes to their user agreement to ensure they could restrict data sharing, bypassing Flock’s default clause, which grants the company a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free” license to disclose agency data for “investigative purposes.”
The de-flocking continues
Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring who recently returned as CEO to re-embrace the company’s original mission of reducing neighborhood crime, expressed deep disappointment about the public’s reaction. In a series of reflections on the feature’s launch, Siminoff defended the tool’s utility and its privacy protections.
Later, addressing the viral criticism, he remarked: “It was a shame,” Siminoff told Fortune. “The misunderstanding of it is what makes me sad, because it’s like people sort of made their own narrative of how it works.” He emphasized the system is entirely voluntary, explaining if a neighbor chooses not to share footage, “your privacy is totally fine, no one knows.” Siminoff maintained the digital system was simply a more efficient version of calling a phone number on a dog’s tag, adding, “I do think it’s a very good-for-the-world thing.”
Announced in October 2025, the Flock-Ring deal was intended to integrate Ring’s Community Requests feature with Flock’s software, allowing police to more easily request and receive footage from private homes.
The partnership drew scrutiny because of Flock’s reported ties to federal agencies. But the Flock spokesperson dismissed these ties as rumors, saying: “We do not have any contracts with any of them, which means they cannot directly access data on the platform.”
The public outcry has been growing. The open-source app DeFlock.org recently launched to track the location of more than 77,000 AI license-plate readers across the country, with the app’s creators arguing the scanners have create a detailed “location history” of ordinary residents, leading to racial profiling and potential stalking by officers. The Flock spokesperson said the technology just shows a license plate at one location at a single point and place in time.
The company is working to implement more guardrails to address any community concerns, adding: “We are ready to work with any of those cities again, should they choose.”
While the contract terminated, Ring said the public sentiment does prove one thing: People want to feel safe in their neighborhoods.
“So while the controversy was sort of high in the social media area,” Siminoff told Fortune, “I’m not sure how much of a percentage of that actually translated into like, population.
“I think a lot of people actually are pretty psyched about safer neighborhoods and returning dogs with a company like Ring maintaining your privacy.”
Additional reporting contributed by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez.
This article has been updated to include comments from Ring, the City of Santa Cruz, and the Town of Windsor.
