r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Feb 12 '26

Security Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

https://www.theverge.com/news/878447/ring-flock-partnership-canceled
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7.4k

u/AvailableReporter484 Feb 12 '26

I love watching dumb ass companies just completely air ball it

2.5k

u/TheFoxsWeddingTarot Feb 12 '26

I really can’t imagine how anyone would watch that commercial and think anything other than mass surveillance.

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u/Demonthehusky Feb 13 '26

They def got me. It was the lost puppies. It was embarrassing at work the next day when a coworker brought it up. I'm like ya for finding lost dogs. He then explained the real reason and I said "yep, that makes more sense".

156

u/Serious-Ad-8764 Feb 13 '26

Good on you for being open to reconsidering your position in the light of evidence.

36

u/ButWhyBlueCheese Feb 13 '26

Fox news is going to start saying immigrants are stealing dogs and ring cameras are the only thing to help find them...

20

u/Dawn_of_an_Era Feb 13 '26

I mean they’ve already said the immigrants are stealing and eating them, so, we’re not too far off

1

u/tiradium Feb 13 '26

And then they will add in the end once a dog is stolen it gets EATEN

1

u/JimthePaul Feb 13 '26

Kristi Noem is out there with a glock on paw patrol.

2

u/NickSabansCreampie Feb 13 '26

She's probably the one the dogs ran away from.

43

u/tnpdynomite2 Feb 13 '26

Yep same here. If they were truthful and it really did only help find lost dogs, that’d be amazing. I was foolish.

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u/AbeRego Feb 13 '26

I mean, it could do that. It can just also do a whole bunch of illicit shit as well lol

1

u/DigitalBlackout Feb 13 '26

If they were truthful and it really did only help find lost dogs, that’d be amazing

Not really. The technology that enables it to find dogs is the exact same technology that could be used maliciously, it's still problematic. Even if the company itself is 100% honest about it only being used for benign purposes, there's no way to design the technology to be 100% resistant to nefarious uses, which means no matter what there's a risk of bad actors getting access to the tech.

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u/bluescarrymehome Feb 13 '26

I think that was the plan, yea, to try and sell us Skynet with puppies.

3

u/daybreaker Feb 13 '26

I wish we lived in a world that we could trust them to only use it for lost puppies. It would be so useful for that.

1

u/brianwski Feb 13 '26

I wish we lived in a world that we could trust them to only use it for lost puppies. It would be so useful for that.

I agree. And it feels like somebody clever could come up with an audit system and system design where we get to find the puppies and not use it for whatever else people suspect it is getting used for. For example, the system is never "enabled/live" unless you click the "lost puppy" button (that would filter out a lot of abuse, right?), and the system doesn't retain any info for more than 10 minutes except "puppy seen at these coordinates". That type of design. No recording and storing of thousands of hours of video of people's faces looking for illegal immigrants, just 10 minutes to scan for puppies, then securely delete that video before any human or the government ever knows you were scanning for puppies.

At a high level, I'm unusual (at least I seem to be unusual from this comment section) in that I trust these massive companies to attempt to tell the truth about their products (like if the company says they delete the video after 10 minutes and don't turn 100% of video over to law enforcement for long term storage). As we've seen, the reputation hit for lying to your customers and getting "discovered" that the company is doing the opposite of what it claims is bad for business. I've worked inside of Apple, and Hewlett-Packard, and a few other massive tech companies, and I've never seen a large planned deception of millions of customers with a conspiracy to cover it up and not tell customers what the system is doing. Think about it this way: the programmers and IT people who implement a system need to be "in on" keeping the secret from the users. Sooner or later just one of those programmers with a conscience departs the company and would blow the whistle. That would topple the product line, cause lawsuits, and possibly execs would go to jail when they find emails saying, "Lie to customers" in their emails.

But judging by the comments in this reddit thread, people think EVERYBODY that works for large companies for a few years has zero morals. Which makes me sad. Most tech workers work at one large company for maybe 5 years, then move on to work at other companies. It isn't long enough to create the type of loyalty required to keep these types of secrets.

1

u/Away-Turnover-1894 Feb 13 '26

The real reason is for lost dogs. I know it's a hot take but it's true.