Ring’s Super Bowl Ad Generates So Much Backlash It Has Ended Its Partnership With Flock Safety
from the millions-well-spent dept
According to AdWeek, the price for a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl LX has soared to $8 million, after NBC opened in the summer by offering spots for $7 million. As AdWeek notes, “due to demand, the company has already reached its cap for the number of spots that were available for advertisers to buy during the upfront season.”
$8 million for 30 seconds sometimes means turning a niche product into a national phenomena. The 30 seconds purchased by Ring went the other way. If you want to see how $8 million can be used to promote mass surveillance enabled by consumer products, here you go:
Sure, it looks pretty innocuous. And what could be better than turning Ring and Flock Safety’s network of cameras into a digital proxy for posting “LOST DOG” signs all over the neighborhood? Well, as it turns out, pretty much everyone saw how problematic this offering was, especially considering what’s already known about Ring, Flock Safety, and both companies’ rather cavalier attitude towards privacy and other aspects of the Fourth Amendment.
To begin with, the “Search Party” feature that allows people to access recordings and images captured by other people’s cameras is already on, which likely comes as a surprise to owners of these devices. Here’s what The Verge’s Jennifer Tuohy discovered last October, shortly after Ring announced its partnership with Flock Safety — a company best known for allowing cops to hunt down people seeking abortions and/or allowing federal officers to perform nationwide searches for whoever they might be looking for (which, of course, would be anyone looking kinda like an immigrant).
[I]t turns out that Search Party is enabled by default. In an email to customers this week, Siminoff wrote that the feature is rolling out to Ring outdoor cameras in November and noted, “You can always turn off Search Party.”
I checked my cameras this morning, and they were all automatically set to enable Search Party. And I’m not alone; Ring users on Reddit have also reported that their cameras have been enabled for Search Party.
This under-reported “feature” was exposed by Ring’s Super Bowl ad, which resulted in enough backlash that Flock Safety no longer has a Ring to wear. Back to Jennifer Tuohy and The Verge:
In a statement published on Ring’s blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: “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 and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
While that last sentence may be true, it appears sharing was on by default when it came to Ring’s own cameras. That Flock Safety never got a chance to participate is good to know, but “Search Party” has apparently been active since its implementation last year, even if it was limited to Ring devices.
And while Ring claims the Search Party feature can’t be used to search for “human biometrics,” that’s hardly comforting when it appears Ring definitely wants to add more of this kind of thing to its existing cameras.
On top of this, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass-surveillance network suddenly seems very small.
Ring insists this is not another mass surveillance tool, but rather something that attempts to recognize who’s at any user’s door when sending alerts, in order to differentiate friends and family members from strangers who might be within camera range. Again, there’s some utility to this offering, but the tech lends itself to surveillance abuses, especially when law enforcement may only be a subpoena away from accessing images and recordings captured by privately-owned devices.
Finally, the statement given by Ring only states that this won’t be happening right now, which is a wise choice considering its unpopularity at the moment. But that doesn’t mean Ring and Flock won’t seek to consummate this marriage of surveillance tech, albeit in a more private fashion that doesn’t involve alarming hundreds of millions of sports viewers simultaneously.
Filed Under: alpr, doorbell cameras, law enforcement, mass surveillance, surveillance abuse
Companies: flock safety, ring
Daily Deal: The 2026 Ultimate Project Managers Training Bundle
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
The 2026 Ultimate Project Managers Training Bundle will help you learn how to efficiently manage small- and large-scale complex projects. With 9 courses focused on Asana, Jira, Agile, Microsoft Project, and more, you’ll be introduced to various ways to organize and manage teams, and to various tools that will aid productivity while keeping projects and tasks on track. The bundle is on sale for $35.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
The Media Still Can’t Figure Out That Trump Says Things That Aren’t True
from the look-out-the-window dept
Debates on how the media should be covering what Donald Trump says have been going on for over a decade now. A few months ago, we wrote about the regularity with which the mainstream media “sanewashes” his more ridiculous statements, taking the incoherent ramblings of a madman and pretending to translate them into actual policy goals. In those cases, the media downplays the things he says, while playing up what they pretend he wanted to say.
But there’s another version of this same problem. The mainstream media also loves to take some random statement he makes, that everyone knows he’s lying (or at least misleading) about, and pretends that he means it earnestly and that it should be reported on as fact.
Both of these failures stem from the same underlying instinct: a desperate need to make Trump fit within conventional political norms. Whether that means cleaning up his incomprehensible gibberish to sound like real policy, or treating his obvious lies as sincere declarations, the effect is identical. The media keeps trying to avoid reporting on just how far outside conventional—and sane—bounds Trump is in how he runs this government.
Margaret Sullivan, who has been one of the sharpest media critics around, has a piece in her newsletter that lays out this side of the problem with depressing clarity:
Are these statements worth reporting? Certainly. Do they require extra dollops of skepticism and context? Even more certainly. But too often, they don’t get that treatment.
The specific examples she highlights are instructive.
On Sunday, as if on cue, federal agents were out in two blue cities in New Jersey, detaining people on their way to work.
“Right now, (ICE) is coming for migrants,” one frightened Hoboken resident, Ernest Boyd, told CBS News. “It’s going to come for all of us.” Jersey City was another target — yes, the same weekend that Trump suggested to reporters on Air Force One that a softer approach was in the offing.
Or even pay attention to what’s happening in Minneapolis. Just as we predicted, despite headlines misleadingly reporting that there was a “new approach” there, we’re still seeing stories every day of ICE and CBP harassing people at schools and dragging away neighbors.
Or take the Greenland situation.
How about his supposed “deal” over Greenland, which his administration was threatening to acquire by “unstoppable force” if necessary? At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he made some remarks about how he could do just that, but wouldn’t do it right now, after all.
The headlines and push alerts, as usual, played it just as he would have liked: “Trump said the U.S. won’t use force to take Greenland” was a typical one from the Wall Street Journal.
“If you only read those headlines,” wrote Parker Molloy on her Substack newsletter, The Present Age, “you’d think the president made some kind of conciliatory gesture.” But, she added, that’s not the core of what happened in that room: Rather, Trump “reminded everyone of his capacity for violence, made clear that resistance would be futile and then offered them a chance to surrender peacefully,” she wrote. His saying he wouldn’t use force “is misdirection, and the coverage fell for it.”
Then there was all kinds of bluster — and coverage — about a supposed “framework for a deal” over Greenland that was again reported as serious breaking news.
“Trump announces ‘framework’ for a future deal on Greenland, drops NATO tariff threat,” was the ABC News take, a typical one.
Sullivan points out the exception that proves the general rule: CNN’s Aaron Blake was one of the few who provided the context that should have been in every headline: “Trump’s Greenland framework sounds a lot like an already existing 1951 deal.” That’s the kind of journalism that actually informs readers.
But for most of the mainstream media, the old pattern holds: Trump threatens something outrageous. Then he backs off slightly from the outrageous thing. The media reports the backing-off as if it’s the story, rather than the fact that the outrageous threat was made in the first place. It’s like praising someone for only punching you once instead of twice.
Part of this is about the fundamental architecture of how news gets consumed:
As always, headlines and news alerts are important. All the nuance in the world in the 12th paragraph doesn’t help much if the headline creates a completely different impression.
This is the core problem. Most people don’t read past the headline. Push alerts are consumed in seconds. The sophisticated context that journalists might include deep in the story is irrelevant if the headline and lede have already painted a misleading picture.
Sullivan offers some practical suggestions that really shouldn’t be revolutionary but apparently are:
First, use words that convey skepticism, not credulity. Instead of a headline that says “Trump orders ICE to ease up…”, try this: “Trump claims a new approach, even as ICE continues arrests.”
Crazy idea: maybe don’t write headlines that treat Trump’s words as equivalent to reality when a decade of evidence suggests they’re often the opposite.
And, to some extent, you can understand why the media keeps doing this. For decades now, the GOP has been “working the refs,” insisting that they got unfair treatment. That the “liberal media” covered them in unfair ways. This was never particularly accurate. The mainstream media has always had a corporatist-bent rather than one that focused on any political ideology.
But, the end result of all that yelling and screaming about “liberal media bias” means that they go out of their way to avoid accurate reporting on just how ridiculous President Trump is. Sometimes that means taking his word salad pronouncements and hopelessly trying to map them to the kinds of things any normal political leader might say. And sometimes, it means taking the untrue things he says as truth, just to pretend there’s some level of normalcy.
The media’s learned helplessness on this issue is its own kind of institutional failure. These are smart people at major news organizations. They have editors. They have fact-checkers. They have a decade of experience covering this specific individual. And still, the default mode is to treat his utterances as newsworthy declarations rather than what they often are: strategic noise designed to generate exactly the coverage it gets.
The press isn’t supposed to be stenographers. They’re supposed to help people understand what’s actually happening. And what’s actually happening is that Trump keeps saying things and the press keeps trying to mold those things from where they really are—way outside political, cultural, reality norms—and presents them in a manner that downplays the reality, cleans up the crazy, and just generally misleads the public.
As the old journalism saw says, if someone says it’s raining, and someone else says it isn’t, a reporter’s job is not to report on what they said, but to look out the damn window and report on what’s actually happening.
It’s raining. It’s been raining for a decade. Now would be as good a time as any for reporters to look out the damn window and report on what’s actually happening.
Filed Under: donald trump, journalism, lies, mainstream media, media, sanewashing
Who Knew? Mindless And Corrupt Deregulation Apparently Kills People
from the this-must-be-the-innovative-utopia-we-were-promised dept
You might recall that a central pillar of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would “take aim at big tech,” protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even “continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan.” The press was filled with endless stories credibly parroting these sorts of claims, all day, everyday.
More than a year later and it’s nothing but corruption and cronyism as far as the eye can see.
The Trump administration and its courts have effectively destroyed regulatory independence, federal consumer protection, U.S. cybersecurity standards, and public safety oversight. Massive, terrible mergers are rubber stamped with reckless abandon, provided companies show authoritarian leadership they’re racist and feckless enough.
A 2025 report by nonprofit consumer advocacy firm Public Citizen calculated that the Trump administration has frozen regulatory action for at least 165 corporations under investigation for a wide variety of abuses, crimes, and fraud. And a more recent study by the nonprofit watchdog Environmental Integrity Project has found that EPA environmental protection has effectively ground to a halt:
“By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the US Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.”
Of course, this didn’t just begin with Trumpism. For the better part of the last fifty years years “free market Libertarians” and Republicans (often with help from corrupt Democrats) have waged a brutal war on the regulatory state, insisting repeatedly that the path toward innovative utopia in all industries required that we defund, understaff, and legally undermine regulators at every turn.
It’s worth noting the majority of these folks weren’t arguing for reasonable and modest regulation, they were arguing, repeatedly, for no meaningful oversight of corporate power whatsoever (see: telecom). When the reality of that unpopular policy choice surfaces in the form of mass suffering, financial hardship, and death, a lot of these very vocal opinion havers routinely get mysteriously fucking quiet.
When it comes to most regulatory agencies, including the EPA, the assault has been multi-pronged. Numerous rulings (like Loper Bright) by the extremist U.S. Supreme Court have utterly demolished regulatory autonomy. And if an enforcement action against a corporation for predatory behavior somehow is brought, Republicans at the 5th and 6th Circuits ensure it can’t go anywhere.
At the same time, you have clowns like Elon Musk waging open war on essential government employees under the pretense of innovative efficiencies, ensuring that agencies don’t have the staff to do their job even if they wanted to:
“Part of the decline in lawsuits against polluters could be due to the lack of staff to carry them out, experts say. According to an analysis from E&E News, at least a third of lawyers in the Justice Department’s environment division have left in the past year. Meanwhile, the EPA in 2025 laid off hundreds of employees who monitored pollution that could hurt human health.”
While authoritarians have taken this all to an entirely new level, the path to this point was paved by no limit of anti-governance propaganda by countless U.S. Libertarian “free market” types, who, from my vantage point, have faced zero reputational or financial harm from leading the country down the path to what will be some extremely bloody and ugly outcomes.
It’s not really possible to fathom the real-world impact of the complete collapse of the federal regulatory state across labor, consumer protection, environmental enforcement, and public safety is going to have in the decades to come. But fortunately for the individuals and companies that made all of this possible, our corporate press really doesn’t seem all that interested in covering the story with any zeal.
Even outlets that do cover this story tend to downplay the impact of the destruction of regulatory oversight structures that took generations to build, with explanations that lull the reader into a deep fucking slumber long before any serious point is made.
It will take decades to repair the damage this era of open corruption has caused, if we ever do. Some state enforcement will attempt to step in and fill the void, but that will prove erratic at best, and nonexistent in many MAGA-dominated states.
Even if we can dislodge ourselves from Trumpism, I suspect many of the most likely candidates for a Democratic Presidency (Gavin Newsom, Mark Kelly) somehow won’t find the time to ensure that restoring regulatory integrity is as big of a priority as restoring corporate research grants. Forcing boxed-in, understaffed, and underfunded regulators to take action on piecemeal issues only after large swaths of people have avoidably died in, once again, completely avoidable and terrible ways.
That’s all depressing as hell, but I’m bored of people normalizing or downplaying the real-world impact of some of the worst corruption this country has ever seen (which is truly saying something).
Filed Under: consumer protection, consumers, deregulation, environment, labor, regulatory state
No comments:
Post a Comment