Ring and Flock are Trying to Create a Sensorveillance State
Free and subsidized doorbell cameras and facial recognition systems leave everyone less free in the end.
When I was growing up in California in the 80s and 90s, I remember how my elementary school had six Apple IIe computers, loaded with software like The Oregon Trail, Logo, and Apple Writer. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but this was kind of crazy in retrospect: my school wasn’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination. It was a proto-charter school in Southern California, serving mostly lower- and middle-class kids whose only defining feature was that their parents were willing to stand in line at 5am on registration day to avoid the admittedly crappier neighborhood public schools. Some of the classrooms weren’t even permanent buildings, and books and materials were often in short supply.1 And yet, we had these shiny Apple IIe’s, which retailed for over $2300 each.
It turns out, we weren’t alone. Thousands of eligible elementary and middle schools in California also had Apple IIe’s, for two simple reasons:
Steve Jobs was a marketing genius; and
Tax breaks.
Jobs saw an opportunity to build loyalty to Apple products at an early age, and so he personally lobbied for federal and state legislation to get Apple computers into classrooms. While Jobs was unsuccessful at the federal level, he did win over California.2
In September 1982, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a similar version of the Computer Equipment Contribution Act, AB 3194, which allowed a 25% tax credit against the state corporate income tax for computer equipment donated to schools. ... [U]nder its Kids Can’t Wait program, Apple donated a computer to each of the roughly 9000 eligible elementary and secondary schools in California.
Source: Audrey Watters, How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom.
The tax break was generous: Apple’s pre-tax donations exceeded $21 million, but their after-tax outlay was a little over $1 million. Apple spent pennies to capture the hearts and minds of millions of kids in California.
The subsidized surveillance state
Amazon, and its Ring subsidiary, as well as facial recognition and automatic license plate recognition companies like Flock Safety, are replicating the Jobsian model. Not in the classroom, but in municipalities and neighborhoods across the US.
Some of this isn’t new. For years, surveillance tech firms, wealthy private donors, and the federal government, have been gifting budget-strapped municipalities and local law enforcement (LLE) with “free” or heavily subsidized access to surveillance equipment and software. Sometimes, this comes in the form of no-strings-attached donations to the police, but often they’re part of short-term trials & pilots which are steeply discounted, and end up extending indefinitely. And since they’re free, come in below municipal procurement thresholds, or are initially time-bound pilots, approvals get fast-tracked, often with limited oversight and public transparency, and few privacy reviews.
Just like Apple, Ring and Flock recognize that it’s also very hard to remove something once people have grown accustomed to it. And getting a municipality or the local police force to give up their shiny toys requires a concerted effort by communities to actually shut the systems down for good.
For example, in May 2025, Denver’s city council unanimously rejected a $666,000 contract extension for Flock Safety ALPR cameras after weeks of public outcry over mass surveillance data sharing with federal immigration enforcement. But Mayor Mike Johnston’s office allowed the cameras to keep running through a “task force” review, effectively extending the program even after the contract was voted down.
In response, the Denver Taskforce to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety and Transforming Our Communities Alliance launched a grassroots campaign demanding the city “turn Flock cameras off now.” They appear to have been “successful” in the sense that almost a year later, Denver is finally ditching Flock--by replacing them with a competitor’s ALPR products.
Going direct to consumer
In response to this pushback, sensorveillance firms seem to be moving away from the traditional LLE pipeline, and are instead adopting a direct-to-consumer ‘participatory mass-surveillance’3 approach. From The Guardian in April 2026:
A Silicon Valley city will offer its residents free wireless doorbells equipped with cameras to help police collect video evidence.
The city council of Milpitas, a suburb north of San Jose, California, recently approved $60,000 to provide these devices on a one-camera-per-household, first-come, first-served basis, as was first reported by Milpitas Beat and confirmed by the Guardian. ...
Milpitas police plan to share a link for residents to voluntarily upload doorbell footage and organize community events, where residents can sign up to participate in the program, said Tyler Jamison, the Milpitas assistant chief of police.
Ring has been adopted as part of a free program in cities across the country, including local initiatives in New York City, Mount Vernon, Syracuse, Philadelphia, Jackson and Cleveland.
Selling surveillance as convenience
Often these initiatives are brought by concerned citizens—usually the parents of crime victims, domestic violence organizations, or elderly advocates.4 In addition to emotional appeals, Ring also highlights all the “helpful” new prosumer capabilities that leverage its AI-enabled “Familiar Faces” technology and Ring’s app ecosystem. From TechCrunch:
With now more than 100 million cameras in the field, Amazon-owned Ring [will launch] a new app store that will expand its cameras’ capabilities. Focused initially on areas like elder care, workforce analytics, rental management, and more, the store will allow developers of all sizes to tap into Ring’s ecosystem to reach customers. ... “With AI, there’s just an incredible amount of long tail use cases,” [Ring CEO and founder Jamie Siminoff] told TechCrunch. “We are unlocking value that our customers have invested in, in things that … all of us together never thought we could do.”
This isn’t about safety, and this isn’t some goodwill effort by Ring. This feels more like an Apple IIe moment in schools. We’re watching a few key players in the sensorveillance space5 try to become extensive.
I first sketched out the idea of tech extensity in February:
Tech extensity occurs when a product, service, or entity becomes so deeply entrenched in a system that imposing limits or excising them entirely (e.g., through regulation or political action), becomes nearly impossible. A firm doesn’t need to be the best to become extensive, or even a technical monopoly. It only needs to find a way to integrate broadly within one or more systems, becoming a critical piece of the puzzle. Ring (and by proximity, Amazon) and Flock are attempting to become an extensive part of the surveillance apparatus, just as Apple (and later, Google) had in education.
One way they might actually succeed is by marketing ever-more-convenient uses of their tools directly to the masses. Another is by giving their product away at a heavy discount or for free.
Behold the torment nexus, pretending to find Fido
Fortunately, we’re not yet at the stage where there’s a Ring doorbell on every porch, or a Flock-connected camera on every street corner. So far, these giveaway programs remain isolated to a handful of cities in America. There’s also been greater pushback over the last year by municipalities and citizens against sensorveillance by Ring and Flock, especially after Amazon’s disastrous “Search Party” Superbowl ad in February, and the Ring/Flock partnership was exposed. Flock’s (aka, “Netflix for Stalkers“)6 tendency to track everything from kids playing in playgrounds to Americans’ shopping habits in malls is hard to reconcile against promises that these systems is just being used to stop the bad guys.
More people are starting to realize that despite all the prosocial claims and helpful features, always-on surveillance is still surveillance. Some people were so outraged by the Superbowl ad that they disconnected or even destroyed their doorbell cameras or lobbied their local officials. Amazon even cancelled its partnership with Flock after the Superbowl blowback.
What this tells me is that Ring and Flock still face resistance to extensivity, but I’m not sure how long this will hold. Many people still see Ring devices as a touching way to create slice-of-life moments for YouTube. Most Americans, sadly, remain unaware of how an extensive network of surveillance can impact their lives, or have resigned themselves to “privacy nihilism.
And Ring certainly has no intention of limiting the (search) party to pets or porch pirates. Here’s a message Siminoff sent to employees in October 2025:
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. You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started.
Just to be clear: Nobody should have to live in an unsafe, or crime-ridden neighborhood, and it’s unforgivable that this fear is a reality for so many. But if you start to think about it, you realize that zeroing out crime isn’t possible. What Siminoff and Garrett Langley, Flock’s CEO, are really trying to do is to build their brands around the perception of safety.
The act of ‘feeling safe’ is an emotional response, not a rationally constructed one. You can live in a gated compound, surrounded by guards, protected in every way and still feel unsafe. This isn’t new, of course, but the expansion of sensorveillance networks, coupled with political polarization, mis- and disinformation, and active exploitation of these anxieties by law enforcement and security firms, exacerbate fears that we’re all unsafe without these products, regardless of their efficacy.
Whether Ring cameras reduce crime or not is irrelevant. They need only create the perception of safety to drive adoption. Making people feel safe is a win-win for everyone. Mnicipalities can say they’re ‘doing something about crime,’ residents feel like something is being done about crime, police get more information about all of us, and Ring and Flock get sweet taxpayer-funded contracts and data they can sell. Everyone gets something in the end.
And as Ring Doorbells and Flock Condors become ever more extensive, use of sensorveillance tools won’t be limited to burglars, gang members, and package thieves. It will expand to target anyone or anything that makes our neighbors fear us. We already see how Ring footage is used to target peaceful protestors. We’ve witnessed ICE leverage Flock ALPR data to go after immigrants. What we have less clarity on is what’s going on behind the scenes. For example, how governments and the private sector may be supplementing existing databases of social media and online profiles, with with residential camera and facial recognition data.
We also don’t know how turning the Neighborhood Watch group into a 21st Century ‘Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter‘ will impact society.
Sure, we have a good idea—these unofficial collaborator networks were shockingly effective in East Germany—but reporting was crude, and neighbors didn’t have the benefit of 24/7 surveillance. How will our behaviors change when our neighbors label harmless interactions as ‘suspicious activity’? How will that affect community behaviors? What happens when these innocent reports lead to discrimination or actual state violence?
We don’t know how extensive surveillance networks will be used in the future, or how it’s changing our behaviors today. I suspect that we won’t have the answers until these networks become extensive to the point that they’re no longer capable of being controlled or removed.
All those free doorbell cameras will end up being very costly in the end.
California loved portable classrooms in the 80s and 90s. Portables were common in Southern California, and were chosen as a cheap way to handle fluctuating student populations. Essentially, they were mobile homes with poor ventilation, cheaply constructed, made of cheap wood and other materials.
See: Dan Calacci, Jeffrey Shen, Alex Pentland, “The Cop in Your Neighbor’s Doorbell: Amazon Ring and the Spread of Participatory Mass Surveillance,” ACM Human-Computer Interactions, Vol 6, No CSCW2 (November 2022). https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555125
It was shocking how many times I saw Ring initiatives paired with community groups or donations being made by Amazon ‘in the memory of’ someone who was the victim of violence. It’s a brilliant marketing play with a direct and palpable emotional appeal.
This is a term coined by GWU law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, in his March 2026 book Your Data Will Be Used Against You.
Benn Jordan’s YouTube videos on Amazon Ring are 100% worth watching, and I highly suggest you do so.