The Device We Trusted
Tens of millions of us bought Ring doorbells because we wanted to see who’s at the door. Maybe packages had gone missing. Maybe we wanted to check on our kids getting home from school. The promise was simple: a camera we control, footage we own, peace of mind on our phones.
Ring now has over 10 million active devices in the U.S. Nest and other smart doorbells add millions more. Flock Safety’s license plate readers sit in more than 5,000 communities. These aren’t gadgets for tech enthusiasts. They’re the new normal for neighborhoods that want to feel safe.
And wanting to feel safe is reasonable. Nobody should have to apologize for locking their doors or watching their porch.
But what happens after the camera turns on — where that footage goes, who sees it, what it’s used for — that part wasn’t in the box.
What It’s Actually Doing
In December 2025, Amazon activated facial recognition on Ring doorbells. The feature is called “Familiar Faces.” It scans every face that walks past the door, matches them against a catalog the owner builds, and sends a notification: “Mom at Front Door.”
Ring says it’s opt-in. And for the device owner, it is. But here’s the catch: the people being scanned never opted in to anything. Our mail carriers, our neighbors walking their dogs, teenagers cutting through the yard — their faces are being processed by Amazon’s AI whether they know it or not. The privacy protections only apply to the person who bought the camera. Everyone else is just data.
Then there’s Flock Safety. Their license plate readers sit in neighborhoods and along roads across the country. In October 2025, reporters revealed that ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide camera network — with no formal contracts. Flock admitted to running “limited pilots” with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. Between June 2024 and May 2025, law enforcement ran more than 4,000 immigration-related searches through Flock-connected systems.
Our neighborhood cameras didn’t just watch our streets. They fed a federal surveillance network that nobody voted for.
And Ring’s relationship with police tells its own story. In January 2024, after years of backlash, Ring announced it would stop letting police request doorbell footage directly through its Neighbors app. Privacy groups called it a victory. The promise lasted about a year. In 2025, Ring partnered with Axon to reinstate police access to doorbell footage — without requiring a warrant. The feature they dismantled came right back.
Ring promised warrants would be required. That promise lasted one year. There is no corporate privacy policy that can’t be reversed with a press release.
Who’s Profiting
Amazon didn’t buy Ring for $1.2 billion to sell us a doorbell. Ring is a data collection device that happens to have a camera on it. Every face scanned, every motion detected, every delivery logged — it feeds Amazon’s AI models and advertising infrastructure. Our front porches are training grounds.
Flock Safety is a private company valued at over $4 billion. It sells surveillance infrastructure to local police departments, then shares the data laterally with federal agencies. The local cops think they’re buying a crime tool. The federal agencies get a nationwide tracking network. Flock gets paid by both sides.
Then there are the data aggregators most of us have never heard of. Companies like LexisNexis and Palantir buy, merge, and resell surveillance data from dozens of sources. Our Ring footage, our Flock plate scans, our phones’ location data, our cars’ telemetry — assembled into profiles that follow us everywhere. No warrant required, because no single company collected all of it.
The business model is simple: we pay for the hardware, they sell what it collects.
I Saw This Firsthand
When I ran my Cricket Wireless stores, I contracted with a security company for monitoring and cameras. The cameras were Hikvision. When I went into the settings to manage user access, there was always a user in China I couldn’t remove. I reached out to the security company — they admitted the cameras were Hikvision, a Chinese company, and they couldn’t remove the Chinese user either. It was just the “best camera system out there.”
I didn’t have anything sensitive going on. But it still bothered me — and it bothers me to this day.
Years later, the FCC flagged Hikvision as a national security threat. Hikvision is headquartered in Hangzhou, China, and its largest shareholder is CETC — a Chinese state-owned defense conglomerate. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law can compel any Chinese company to assist state intelligence operations. In 2019, the US Department of Commerce added Hikvision to the Entity List. In November 2022, the FCC banned new authorizations for Hikvision equipment entirely.
I noticed the problem from my store’s camera settings years before the government caught up. That’s the pattern — the creep gets in before anyone with authority does anything about it.
I get why people want a Ring doorbell. I understand the appeal completely. We hear a noise at 2 a.m. and we want to check our phones instead of opening the door. Our kids come home to an empty house and we want to see them walk in safe. That’s not paranoia. That’s parenting. That’s common sense.
The problem isn’t that people want security cameras. The problem is that the company selling us security is also selling our footage to the people we might need security from. That trade-off was never explained. It was buried in a terms-of-service agreement that nobody reads, and it changes whenever Amazon decides it should.
The Alternative: Security We Actually Control
Security and surveillance don’t have to be the same thing. We can protect our homes without handing our neighborhoods over to Amazon and the federal government. Here’s what that looks like:
- Community-controlled cameras — neighborhoods should be able to run their own camera systems on local servers, with footage that stays in the community unless a court orders otherwise. Open-source tools like Frigate already do this. The technology exists. What’s missing is the policy to support it.
- Warrant requirements for police access — if law enforcement wants our doorbell footage, they get a warrant from a judge. Period. No “Request for Assistance” workarounds, no corporate partnerships that bypass the Fourth Amendment. A law, not a policy that can be reversed next quarter.
- Facial recognition opt-in at the community level — before any neighborhood deploys facial recognition, the community votes on it. Not the HOA board. Not the police chief. The residents. Illinois and Portland already restrict biometric surveillance. Congress should set a national floor.
- Encrypted storage we control — footage should be encrypted on our device before it ever leaves the house. The server stores scrambled data only we can unlock. The company runs the software and pushes updates, but never sees the content. If law enforcement wants it, they come to us with a warrant — the company can’t hand over what it can’t read. The technology already exists — it’s how Signal handles messages and how Proton handles email. Ring added end-to-end encryption in 2022, but made it opt-in and buried it in settings. It should be the default. And after thirty days, the footage is deleted unless we choose to keep it. Our Tuesday afternoons shouldn’t be searchable five years from now.
- Federal contracts require transparency — no more “limited pilots” that give federal agencies access to local camera networks without public knowledge. If ICE or any other agency wants access to community surveillance data, there needs to be a public contract, a public vote, and a public record.
The goal isn’t to take anyone’s doorbell camera away. It’s to make sure the camera works for us — not for Amazon, not for Flock Safety, and not for a federal agency that never asked our permission.