On February 12th, 2026, Ring put out a statement announcing the cancellation of their planned coordination and partnership with Flock.
In October 2025, Ring and Flock Safety announced our intention to work together on an integration with Community Requests. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.
At Ring, our mission has always been to make neighborhoods safer. That mission comes with significant responsibility—to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and features.
Community Requests remain a core feature of Ring’s mission. The feature empowers Ring camera owners to choose to share specific videos with local police in response to requests for help with active investigations – or ignore the request altogether. Participation is always voluntary. You have complete control over whether to respond to a Community Request and what you share. Every Community Request is publicly posted and searchable for complete transparency and auditability.
Neighbors have already come together in a time of need utilizing this feature. When a shooting occurred near Brown University in December 2025, every second mattered. The Providence Police Department turned to their community for help, putting out a Community Request. Within hours, 7 neighbors responded, sharing 168 videos that captured critical moments from the incident. One video identified a new key witness, helping lead police to identify the suspect’s vehicle and solve the case. With a shooter at large, the community faced uncertainty about their safety. Neighbors who chose to share footage played a crucial role in neutralizing the threat and restoring safety to their community.
We remain focused on building tools that empower neighbors to help one another while maintaining strong privacy protections and transparency about how our features work. We’ll continue to carefully evaluate future partnerships to ensure they align with our standards for customer trust, safety, and privacy.
Source: Ring statement (archived)
Soon after, Flock put out a strained and studiously vague statement of their own.
We want to share an update: the planned integration between Flock and Ring’s Community Request tool has been canceled. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock.
We believe this decision allows both companies to best serve their respective customers and communities. Flock remains dedicated to supporting law enforcement agencies with tools that are fully configurable to local laws and policies, and we continue to engage directly with public officials and community leaders.
We appreciate Ring’s partnership and collaborative approach throughout our discussions.
Source: Flock statement (archived)
Commentary
This is a significant development which will no doubt humorously anger Flock CEO Garrett Langley, who has a tendency to scream and yell that we are criminals, not too much unlike his Palantir counterpart, Alexander Karp.
The impacts of this statement remain to be seen. With hatred toward these privately owned porch camera companies at an all-time high, the pressure to make this move was immense, and the relief it provides, especially to Ring’s defenders, is immediate. As people increasingly attempted to return their cameras outside of the return period and viewed a not-so-warmly received Super Bowl ad, the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie raged on.
The Guthrie Case
Guthrie, an 84-year-old Tucson resident, vanished from her home on February 1st in what law enforcement has classified as a suspected kidnapping for ransom. Doorbell camera footage captured a masked individual attempting to disable the device. It was amid this investigation that FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed the bureau had recovered porch camera footage from a “backend system” maintained by Ring’s largest competitor, despite the victim’s family confirming that the device had no active subscription at the time.
Because President Trump delivered these great partnerships with these private-sector companies, we were able to execute lawful searches, and go to these private-sector companies and expedite results and then go into their systems, and actually excavate material that people would think would normally be deleted and no one would look for.
And basically without getting into too many of the details, that’s how the FBI works with our private-sector partners to pull out the material that people thought didn’t even exist because of a specific type subscription service on the ring doorbell, but thanks to this brilliant partnership, we were able to get it out, sharpen it with our technical capabilities at the FBI, and put it out to the world
Source: Kash Patel on Hannity (3:35)
This revelation raises serious questions about the extent of access device manufacturers retain over the surveillance data captured by their products. It suggests these companies may possess a far more comprehensive record of activity on and around your property than the consumer themselves, unless that consumer opts to pay a subscription fee for access to features and services frequently justified as covering “cloud storage costs.”
Numerous boundaries of personal privacy have been eroded in the United States. To characterize this single cancellation as a victory is to accept a dangerously low threshold for satisfaction. We should not be satisfied so easily.