Amazon scraps partnership with surveillance company after Super Bowl ad backlash

Amazon's smart doorbell maker Ring has terminated a partnership with police surveillance tech company Flock Safety.

The announcement follows a backlash that erupted after 30-second Ring ad that aired during the Super Bowl featuring a lost dog that is found through a network of cameras, sparking fears of a dystopian surveillance society.

But that feature, called Search Party, was not related to Flock. And Ring's announcement doesn't cite the ad as a reason for the ''joint decision" for the cancellation.

Ring and Flock said last year they were planning on working together to give Ring camera owners the option to share their video footage in response to law enforcement requests made through a Ring feature known as Community Requests.

''Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,'' Ring's statement said.

''The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.''

Flock reiterated that it never received Ring customer videos — and that ending the planned integration was a mutual decision that allows both companies to ''best serve their respective customers.'' In a statement, Flock added that it ''remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies.''

Still, Flock says it doesn't own the data captured by its cameras, its customers do. So if a police department, for example, chooses to collaborate with a federal agency like ICE, ''Flock has no ability to override that decision,'' the company notes on its website.

Beyond the Flock partnership, Amazon has faced other surveillance concerns over its Ring doorbell cameras.

In the Super Bowl ad, a lost dog is found with Ring's Search Party feature, which the company says can ''reunite lost dogs with their families and track wildfires threatening your community.'' The clip depicts the dog being tracked by cameras throughout a neighborhood using artificial intelligence.

Viewers took to social media to criticize it for being sinister, leaving many wondering if it would be used to track humans and saying they would turn the feature off.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focus on civil liberties related to digital technology, said this week that Americans should feel unsettled over the potential loss of privacy.

Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts also urged Amazon to discontinue its ''Familiar Faces'' technology.