When Ring aired its Super Bowl ad showing the “Search Party” feature helping find lost puppies, it looked like harmless tech innovation. A month later, leaked internal emails reveal that Ring’s CEO views this as just the beginning.
“First for finding dogs,” Jamie Siminoff told employees in October, describing Search Party’s purpose. The feature, he wrote, would become “one of the most important pieces of tech” to help “zero out crime in neighborhoods.”
That’s not a pet finder. That’s a surveillance network.
How Search Party Actually Works
Search Party launched in September 2025 as an opt-out feature, meaning it’s enabled by default on Ring cameras that save video to the cloud. When someone in your neighborhood reports a lost pet through the Ring app, the system scans footage from participating cameras using AI image recognition.
If Ring’s AI detects a potential match, the camera owner gets a notification. They can then choose whether to share the clip with the pet’s owner.
Ring says the feature only searches for animals, not people. The company has repeatedly stated that Search Party “does not process human biometrics or track people.”
But the infrastructure tells a different story. Ring has built a distributed network of millions of privately owned cameras that can be mobilized for AI-powered visual search at the push of a button. Whether it searches for dogs or humans is a software setting, not a hardware limitation.
Congress Wants Answers
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ranking Member of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services, sent Ring a formal letter demanding answers about the feature.
His concerns were specific:
Mass surveillance potential. “While finding lost pets is an admirable mission, the use of AI to scan doorbell camera recordings raises serious privacy concerns related to the potential for mass surveillance of people and implications for Fourth Amendment rights.”
Opt-out design. The feature is automatically enabled on eligible devices. Users must navigate a six-step process within the Ring app to disable it. Krishnamoorthi called this “confusing for users” and warned of “widespread unintentional surveillance.”
24/7 neighborhood access. Search Party allows Ring to access and scan recordings from cameras throughout a neighborhood, creating “a 24/7 surveillance network with only passive consent from the camera owner and limited awareness from neighbors in the same community.”
Krishnamoorthi requested documents and detailed explanations from Ring by March 12, 2026, about how the company collects, classifies, and tracks video data.
The Flock Safety Connection
The Search Party revelation comes alongside another failed Ring expansion. In October 2025, Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety to integrate its license plate reader technology with Ring’s Community Requests feature, which allows police to request video footage from users.
Flock Safety operates a network of AI-powered cameras used by over 5,000 police departments. Reports indicated the technology has been used in immigration investigations by ICE.
The partnership would have connected Ring’s network of home cameras with Flock’s law enforcement tools, creating a seamless pipeline for police access to neighborhood surveillance footage.
After the Super Bowl ad ignited public backlash, Ring announced on February 12 that both companies had “made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration.” The stated reason: it would require “significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”
Ring emphasized that the integration never went live and no customer videos were sent to Flock Safety.
The Pattern Is Clear
Ring’s trajectory reveals a consistent strategy: introduce surveillance capabilities under emotionally appealing use cases, then expand the scope.
The company already offers “Familiar Faces,” which uses facial recognition to tag known individuals on your doorbell footage. It maintains Community Requests, through which police can solicit video from Ring users during investigations. It partnered with Axon, the company behind TASERs and police body cameras.
Now Search Party establishes AI-powered scanning of neighborhood camera networks. Ring says it’s just for dogs. Ring’s CEO told employees it’s for “zeroing out crime.”
These aren’t contradictions. They’re phases.
How to Opt Out
If you own a Ring camera and want to disable Search Party:
- Open the Ring app on your phone
- Tap the menu button (top left)
- Choose Control Center
- Select Search Party
- Turn off “Search for Lost Pets”
Once disabled, your camera won’t participate in pet searches and you won’t receive notifications.
For more comprehensive privacy controls, consider also disabling:
- Familiar Faces - Facial recognition for identifying people
- Community Requests - Police access to request your footage
- Neighbors Feed - Location-based crime reporting from Ring users
Each of these features extends Ring’s surveillance capabilities beyond your own doorstep.
The Bottom Line
Ring’s Search Party may genuinely help people find lost dogs. But the CEO’s own words confirm what critics suspected: the real purpose is building infrastructure for neighborhood-wide AI surveillance. The question isn’t whether Ring will expand beyond pets. It’s when.