Amazon apparently thought the world would respond with a collective “awww” when it announced an expansion of its Ring Search Party feature to help find lost dogs, promoted via a 30-second Super Bowl ad (below). Instead, it’s being widely panned as a dystopian move in the current climate.

Since the company has recently rolled out a facial recognition capability for the Ring video doorbell, people drew the obvious and exceedingly short line between surveilling for dogs to surveilling for people …

The Search Party for Dogs feature works by allowing owners of lost dogs to send a photo and description to other nearby Ring doorbell users. When the camera thinks it has spotted a dog matching the description, it alerts the homeowner. If they confirm that it looks like the right dog, it puts them in touch with the owner of the pet.

The company has now rolled out the feature to non-ring camera owners via the Ring app, going all in on promoting it – including the Super Bowl ad seen below.

Since launch, Search Party has helped bring home more than a dog a day—and now, the feature is available to non-Ring camera owners via the Ring app for the first time.

“Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighborhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” said Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s chief inventor. “Now, pet owners can mobilize the whole community—and communities are empowered to help—to find lost pets more effectively than ever before. That’s why we believe it’s so important to make this feature available to anyone who shares a lost dog post in Neighbors.”

With nationwide protests against ICE operations, it’s no surprise that the company did not get the positive response it expected. 404 Media didn’t pull any punches.

At Sunday’s Super Bowl, Ring advertised “Search Party,” a cute, horrifyingly dystopian feature nominally designed to turn all of the Ring cameras in a neighborhood into a dragnet that uses AI to look for a lost dog […]

It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years.

The Neighbours app quickly got a reputation for racists sharing reports of supposedly suspicious-looking people whose skin colour was the only thing they had in common.

The Verge reports many others responding in the same way, including Senator Ed Markey.

A quick search on X shows this to be the prevailing view.

You can watch a higher quality version of the 30-second ad below.

• Official Apple Store on Amazon
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Image: Amazon