Amazon paid $10 million for a 30-second Super Bowl ad about lost dogs and tearful reunions.
Most viewers saw a heartwarming commercial.
Now a leaked internal email from Ring's founder has surfaced, and what it says about that Super Bowl ad changes everything.
Amazon Ring's Search Party Was Never About Dogs
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff sent the email to every employee in October 2025, right after Search Party launched.
He wasn't talking about dogs.
"I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission," he wrote, according to 404 Media.
Search Party uses AI to scan live feeds from neighboring Ring cameras.
Then he said it: "You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods."
Dogs don't commit crimes. Only people do – which means the only way Ring's network ever "zeros out crime" is by watching people, not pets.
Siminoff knew exactly what he was describing.
He called it "by far the most innovation that we have launched in the history of Ring."
That's not how you talk about a pet-finder app. That's how you talk about a surveillance empire.
Ring's response to the leak told the rest of the story.
A company spokesperson told TechRadar that Siminoff's comments "were intended to speak broadly to the long-term potential of customer-controlled features."
Translation: he meant it, but he didn't mean to say it where anyone outside Amazon could read it.
Amazon Ring Facial Recognition and Law Enforcement Access Are Already Live
Search Party is switched on by default across all 20 million Ring cameras in American homes.
Ring's AI taps into the live feeds of every camera on a block simultaneously.
The company's "Familiar Faces" feature uses facial recognition to identify specific individuals caught on camera.
Twenty million cameras. Facial recognition. Live feeds scanned in real time. Not one of those features required your permission to turn on.
Amazon was also quietly building the law enforcement connection through its partnership with Flock Safety – a company running over 80,000 AI surveillance cameras across 49 states, performing more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month.
Flock doesn't just read license plates – it logs vehicle descriptions, distinguishing marks, and damage, all stored in a searchable database available to thousands of law enforcement agencies, often without a warrant.
Ring dropped the Flock partnership four days after the Super Bowl backlash hit.
They claimed the integration "required more resources than anticipated."
Nobody bought it.
What Ring didn't drop: Community Requests, which lets police ask Ring users for footage.
The partnership with Axon – another major police surveillance company. And Search Party itself, still running in your neighborhood right now.
When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was killed on a university campus last fall, Siminoff sent employees another email with footage of the shooting.
His message: "It just shows how important the community request tool will be as we fully roll it out."
He wasn't grieving. He was pitching his surveillance network to his own staff using a dead man.
None of this should surprise anyone who's watched what Jeff Bezos's company actually does with its power.
In 2022, Amazon admitted it handed Ring camera footage to law enforcement 11 times that year without the owner's knowledge or consent – any police department could fill out a form, no warrant, no judge, no oversight, and Amazon would hand over the video.
Over 2,000 departments were enrolled in that system.
Amazon promised warrants would be required going forward, got good press for it, and then Siminoff came back and reversed every one of those reforms.
This is the same Amazon that fires workers who speak out, funds radical leftist political causes, and uses the Washington Post as a weapon against conservatives.
Now that same company has 20 million cameras linked by AI outside American homes, a facial recognition system that can identify anyone in frame, and a founder who wrote in plain English that he intends to use it to control entire neighborhoods.
Jeff Bezos built a system that makes Big Brother look like a neighborhood watch.
The cameras are already on. The AI is already scanning. And if your neighbor has a Ring – you're already in it.
Sources:
- Jason Koebler, "Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs," 404 Media, February 18, 2026.
- Alex Blake, "Ring Says Its Leaked Plan to 'Zero Out Crime in Neighborhoods' Doesn't Mean Mass Surveillance," TechRadar, February 19, 2026.
- Staff, "Amazon's Ring Scraps Law Enforcement Integration Amid Surveillance Conflagrations," Security Boulevard, February 2026.
- Brian Heater, "Amazon's Ring Gave a Record Amount of Doorbell Footage to the Government," TechCrunch, July 13, 2022.
- Staff, "'Dystopian' Super Bowl Ad for Ring Camera Gets Bipartisan Blowback," Mediaite, February 9, 2026.
