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Amazon's Ring is running a spy ring from your home. Here's how to turn it off.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Amazon's Ring is running a spy ring from your home. Here's how to turn it off.

You and your neighbors can disable Ring’s intrusive AI Search Party spyware.

If there were one thing that stood out about the Super Bowl commercials this year — aside from companies desperately appealing to Millennials with '90s-themed nostalgia — it was the prevalence of artificial intelligence. Chief among them, Amazon showed off a new AI feature that taps into its broad Ring camera network to create a mass surveillance dragnet so effective that "Minority Report" would blush. Even worse, the feature is enabled by default, which means your Ring camera could be scanning your street right now.

Your neighborhood is under AI surveillance

We live in odd times when Amazon would willingly spend millions of dollars on a Super Bowl ad, just to tell the world a secret that most companies would keep to themselves — that their Ring cameras are now essentially AI-powered mass surveillance tools.

Your cameras have been automatically opted in, and they are actively scanning your street.

The feature is called Search Party. In the 30-second ad, a little girl is given a puppy. After falling in love with him, the dog goes missing, only to be found after Ring cameras installed throughout the neighborhood scan the streets and identify the missing pet. It’s a heartwarming tale on the surface, positioning Search Party as a smart and helpful way to find a lost dog and bring him back home.

To Amazon’s credit, the feature was meant to be a benefit to users, boasting that more than one dog has been returned home per day since the feature launched. The broader implications, however, are that Search Party’s capabilities could easily be expanded to scan the faces of humans. It’s not unrealistic either, since Ring already does a version of this for designated family and friends with a feature called Familiar Faces. With humans as the target instead of animals, Ring’s camera network could create a surveillance state bolstered with facial recognition, ID matching, and a criminal database. It’s the stuff of dystopian nightmares.