Should Ring users be worried by this Super Bowl commercial?
By Easton Martin | February 12, 2026
A seemingly heartwarming Super Bowl LX commercial featuring a lost puppy and a community of helpful neighbors has ignited a fierce national debate over digital privacy. The advertisement, which debuted during the February 2026 championship game, showcases Ring’s new AI powered Search Party feature.
While the company markets the tool as a breakthrough for reuniting families with missing pets, privacy advocates warn that the underlying technology creates a massive, localized surveillance network.
The Search Party feature allows users to upload a photo of a lost dog to the Ring app. Nearby cameras with the feature enabled then use artificial intelligence to scan recorded footage for potential matches. It seems that if the software can identify specific animals across a neighborhood, it can just as easily be adapted to track human beings. These concerns are compounded by the existing Familiar Faces program, which already uses biometric data to recognize frequent visitors at a user’s doorstep.
Skepticism toward the technology is rooted in a history of Ring’s privacy failures. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission sued Ring after discovering that employees and contractors had unfettered access to private customer videos. The agency alleged that Ring used this sensitive footage to train its algorithms without obtaining user consent. That legal battle resulted in a 5.8 million dollar settlement, and the government began distributing refunds to over 100,000 impacted customers in 2024.
As Amazon continues to integrate advanced AI into home security hardware, the line between community safety and invasive monitoring remains sketchy at best. While Ring maintains that users have full control over their data, the default settings for these network features often require manual opt out.
