Amazon's doorbell/smart home devices arm Ring announced on Friday that it's canceling a partnership with Flock Safety it entered into last year, amid a backlash that reached a crescendo following Ring's Super Bowl commercial on Feb. 8.
The commercial was for Ring's new Search Party feature, meant to help homeowners find lost dogs. But instead of generating warm fuzzies among pet owners, the ad drew attention and scrutiny to Ring's overall privacy practices, particularly its partnership with groups that work with law enforcement. It coincides with a moment when Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has caused deep divisions in the US.
Although Flock denies it shares data with ICE, Ring said it's decided to stop the partnership before it got started, stressing that it never sent videos to Flock as part of its Community Requests program. "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated," the blog post says.
It does not make mention of public pressure being a factor, although there've been reports of users disconnecting their Ring devices or destroying them in response to the Super Bowl advertisement.
The closest the blog post comes to acknowledging a public relations issue is the last line: "We'll continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with our standards for customer trust, safety and privacy."
While the Flock partnership is dead, Amazon also entered into a partnership with Axon, which makes Taser devices and works with law enforcement agencies. And it continues to provide Ring cloud videos to law enforcement under request, as happened recently with the recent Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case, in which deleted Ring footage was recovered.
A representative for Ring told CNET that there are no other changes to Ring's Community Requests program.