Ring Kills Flock Safety Deal After Super Bowl Ad Uproar

The widespread protests in Iran have exposed both Tehran’s brutal tactics in the streets, where state authorities have killed thousands of demonstrators since early January, and extreme measures to block access to the global internet.

As it has done repeatedly in the past, the Iranian regime cut off the country’s residents from the global internet during the latest anti-government uprising. But it also shut down access to the country’s intranet, known as the National Information Network, which new research found is becoming a mechanism of constant and pervasive surveillance that may ultimately be the only way Iranians can get online.

The last remaining major nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia just expired. So what will take its place? Artificial intelligence, of course. At least, that’s what some researchers believe. Combined with satellite imagery and human reviewers, AI-powered systems could replace in-person inspection of countries’ nuclear facilities. Obviously, there are flaws to this plan.

Cryptocurrencies may be only 16 years old, but they’ve already become the money form of choice for the world’s worst people. Crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis this week revealed that blockchain-based transactions linked to the sale of human beings into prostitution and forced scamming has nearly doubled over the past year, with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions annually. Chainalysis researchers say that amount is likely an underestimate.

While the Trump administration says it is winding down its immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, the damage is still being done to the US court system in that state. A WIRED analysis found that court filings meant to give people the chance to be released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody skyrocketed in January, leaving US attorneys stretched to the breaking point and people left imprisoned far beyond when they should have been let free.

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection has signed a $225,000 deal with Clearview AI that gives Border Patrol intelligence units access to the company’s face-recognition technology.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Ring is once again backtracking over the public’s distaste for mass surveillance. In an announcement first reported by The Verge, Ring explained that after a “comprehensive review,” it determined that its plan to integrate its sprawling network of privately owned surveillance cameras with Flock Safety, a company that sells license plate reader technology to police departments across the US, “would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”

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

The cancellation of its Flock partnership comes just days after the company aired an ad during the Super Bowl featuring its new Search Party feature that “uses AI to help families find lost dogs.” Many people reacted to the feature by asking, essentially, “If Search Party can find lost dogs, that’s definitely going to be used to hunt down people too, right?”

Owned by Amazon since 2018, Ring for years drew condemnation from privacy advocates over its partnerships with police departments and a tool in its Neighbors app that allowed authorities to obtain surveillance footage directly from people who have Ring cameras installed rather than through any process with judicial oversight, like getting a warrant. The company eliminated the tool in early 2024. Flock has sparked similar ire due to its dragnet surveillance network that, according to 404 Media, ICE has surreptitiously tapped into as part of its relentless quest to remove immigrants from US soil.

Face recognition is not having a great moment in American society: Democratic lawmakers have asked ICE to stop using face recognition in the streets, and ICE itself keeps getting freaked out about people potentially using it on its agents.

This “dynamic political environment,” as an internal Meta memo obtained by the Times put it, is one where Meta might be updating its smart glasses to include a new face recognition feature that has internally been referred to as Name Tag.