The Super Bowl featured an ad from Ring, showing a new feature called “Search Party.” Like the name implies, this feature allows Ring doorbells to search for dogs. Ring claims that, by simply uploading a picture of your lost dog to the Ring app, their doorbells will be able to search for your dog using AI. On the surface, this feature seems helpful, but what do the people its meant to benefit think of it?
Ring is a company that sells doorbells with built-in cameras that allow you to see who is at your door remotely, with a microphone and speaker letting you talk to them. It was started by Jamie Siminoff in 2013, but was bought out by Amazon in 2018 for approximately $1 billion.
35% of the students at Anderson who responded to a survey about this new feature don’t believe it’s a good change. The reason most commonly cited for this is that it serves as a precedent for mass surveillance. The other 65% of students believe this feature is beneficial, though, because it can be useful to find a dog that wandered away. In the future, it might also be expanded to allow searching for more than just a lost dog.
On a similar note, the Texas Department of Public Security (DPS) recently started installing Flock Security’s license plate reading cameras across the city. Previously, Austin had a contract with Flock Security to have these cameras installed in June 2023, but ended it in June 2025 after push back. Austin does not have access to the cameras DPS is installing. 40% of those who responded to the survey think DPS installing these cameras is a good thing, citing their original purpose as cameras to catch and track criminals. This would help law enforcement catch criminals who otherwise wouldn’t be caught. Another 40% don’t because they can also be used for mass surveillance and tracking people who haven’t broken any laws. The remaining 20% of students think this is not definitively either good or bad, and depends on how it’s used.
Whether or not you want it to, this matters and will continue to matter. These features set a risky precedent for the future., and whether the search party feature and license plate cameras are beneficial or not, it’s important they are used in the right way, especially since both of these enable mass surveillance if put into the wrong hands. Ultimately, we must decide whether the good these things bring is worth their potential bad.
