What Ring’s ‘Search Party’ Really Did, and Why Its Super Bowl Ad Gave People The Secret

Reuniting families and their lost pooches, what’s not to love? Well, coordinated neighborhood watch, for one.

That sums up the reaction to the Super Bowl ad for Search Party, an AI-powered feature from Amazon’s Ring that integrates outdoor cameras all over the place to help find lost dogs.

Search Party raised privacy concerns when it launched last year, focusing in part on the fact that the feature automatically turns on eligible cameras, requiring users to opt out. But like most things, the spotlight during the biggest game of the year took it to a whole new level.

Here’s how it works: When someone reports a missing dog in the Ring app, the nearby Reporter-enabled outdoor cameras use AI to scan their saved photos for potential matches.

If the camera sees something, the owner of the camera (not the owner of the lost dog) gets a notification. They then decide whether to share the clip with the dog’s owner. Nothing is automatically shared. Searches are temporary, they expire after a few hours unless renewed.

That kind of subtlety doesn’t exactly translate into a 30-second Super Bowl spot. But even with a full understanding of how it works, critics aren’t buying it. The ad has been labeled “creepy” and “dystopian,” with critics pointing out the obvious: if Ring’s AI can scan neighborhood cameras for a particular dog, what’s to stop it from doing the same for a human?

For the record, Ring says Search Party isn’t designed to process people’s biometrics, and those Search Party images aren’t included in the company’s Community Applications service, which allows law enforcement to request video voluntarily shared by Ring users.

In an interview with GeekWire last year, Amazon VP and Ring co-founder Jamie Siminoff (the guy in the ad) described the Search Group feature as a breakthrough in AI development, saying it couldn’t have been built at a reasonable cost even two years ago.

Asked how the company balances these types of benefits with privacy concerns, he said Ring’s approach is to give customers total power. “You don’t measure it,” she said. “You give your customers 100% control. It’s their data. They control it.”

But for critics, the problem is not about what the Search Party is doing now. It’s about what basic technology can be used for on the road.

That concern is heightened by Ring’s latest moves. The company also released Familiar Faces, which allows users to register photos of family and friends so that their cameras can identify specific people, but are limited to those the camera owner knows.

Ring’s partnership with Flock Safety, a license-plate-recognition company used by thousands of police departments, is another lightning rod, though Ring says the merger isn’t live yet. The partnership is part of Ring’s Community Applications tool, which allows local law enforcement to request images from nearby Ring users during active investigations. Users can choose to ignore those requests.

The company says it has no affiliation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is not sharing the video with the agency. But civil rights groups, including the ACLU, have raised concerns that if the video reaches local police, there’s no guarantee it will stay there, especially given reports that other mob-linked departments have already looked into ICE.

Siminoff, who returned to Ring’s helm last year after a temporary hiatus, has been open about accepting the company’s first mission to make neighborhoods safer, including restoring relationships with law enforcement that were put off during his absence.

In an interview with GeekWire, he acknowledged that not everyone inside the company was on board with the change, but said he was “very convicted of the impact we can have with Ring,” and on a much faster timeline than he would have imagined in the past, thanks to AI.

Amazon says Search Party has reunited more than one lost dog a day with their families since its launch. Committing $1 million to equip animal shelters with Ring cameras. But the big question fueling the backlash is whether finding lost puppies today is building the infrastructure for something more likely and desirable in the future.