Super Bowl adverts often draw discussion. This year, between AI-generated art and slots for weight loss drugs and gambling sites, the smart-doorbell company Ring claimed the crown for the most controversial – and viral – ad so far.
It shows how Ring’s newest upgrades utilise AI and cameras in its new Search Party feature to find a family’s lost dog, Milo. Milo is found because all the neighbours have Ring doorbells, and thanks to the linked-up footage from their cameras across the neighbourhood, he is reunited with his family.
It’s portrayed as heartwarming when the little girl is reunited at the end of the ad with her dog, offering a cute and definitely not sinister reason for having a doorbell camera in every home.
But it is, of course, dystopian and creepy, and immediately sparked discussion online. If they can track your dogs, what else can they track? Cats? Or, more importantly, people?
The internet's dog experts were not impressed. One of social media’s foremost canine-friendly accounts, known on TikTok, Instagram, X, and the rest as WeRateDogs, broke down what the ad was really trying to do.
“Ring’s Super Bowl advert this year uses dogs to manufacture consent for mass surveillance,” WeRateDogs owner elegantly argued in a reel, pointing out that the doorbell system is not built for finding lost pets but turning homes into spy outposts and well-meaning neighbours into unwitting government informants. The video went swiftly viral, clocking up 350k views on YouTube and 1.5m on Instagram. It says something when one of the internet’s leading cute dog accounts is pushing out warnings about the consequences of surveillance.
Ring is owned by Amazon, which acquired the company in 2018. There have been concerns around the data that the doorbells collect from users, with some people online claiming to have returned their devices as a result. Ring recently implemented new facial recognition capabilities in the US, which can track the faces of known individuals, usually family or friends, interacting with the doorbells.
However, this has also raised privacy issues. Activists have also expressed concern about a recently announced partnership (which has not yet come into effect) with Flock Safety – a company that advertises its services to “eliminate crime” and is used by law enforcement agencies to monitor vehicles via number-plate data.
Ring has insisted that the system is not about mass surveillance, and that there are features within the app and subscriptions that control what is seen and shared with neighbours. In the meantime, WeRateDogs have suggested better ways to retrieve a lost dog: make sure they are microchipped and check in on local Facebook groups who are '“scarily efficient” at reuniting kids with their four legged friends.