The backlash against Ring’s Superbowl ad has already mostly faded. The key casualty was a cancelation of the Ring partnership with Flock Safety, which according to the announcement was because “…the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.” However, that cancelation came shortly after the Superbowl commercial aired and the backlash began, and it’s widely believed there is a direct relationship between those facts. Regardless, the hubbub has faded, as it does with most consumer privacy backlashes, and it’s likely to pop up again, also without structural change, unless and until consumer attitudes toward surveillance meaningfully shift.
Why The Backlash?
The main backlash against the commercial has been that it advocates an always-on, surveillance-by-default operating paradigm. Further, it uses the example of finding a lost pet to pull on the heartstrings of the audience to convince them of this (disclosure: the dog in the ad is a yellow lab, like my dogs, so it did, in fact pull on my heartstrings).
Behind the scenes, or at least not directly mentioned in the ad, Ring was also planning an integration with Flock Safety, a well-known provider of surveillance capabilities to law enforcement. This latter part recalled the situation from 2019-2022 in which Ring was criticized for a number of privacy related issues and ultimately ended via a Ring 2023 settlement with the FTC on a number of issues, including a financial penalty and Ring canceling a law enforcement surveillance request portal.
Because the canceled Flock Safety agreement was to provide a law enforcement request portal, it was perceived as essentially an attempt to reverse that prior cancelation. Thus the backlash.
Where Does It Go From Here?
Probably nowhere. Now that the immediate volume has died down and Ring has retreated from another attempt at commercializing law enforcement access to its platform. Consumers are likely to continue business as usual with their Rings.
Besides the 2019-2022 Ring debacle, another good example of this dynamic is the 2021 WhatsApp privacy policy controversy. In this case, WhatsApp pushed, via an in-app notification a requirement for users to accept updated terms of service. While it didn’t technically change how encryption worked on the platform or make data readable by Facebook (which shares parent company, Meta with WhatsApp), the notification was widely perceived to imply that users must accept data sharing or lose access to the platform.
The backlash in this case was swift and seemingly meaningful. In a matter of days, Signal downloads increased 4200%, Telegram saw 25 million downloads in 72 hours, hitting 500 million active users, even Elon Musk got in on the trend, famously tweeting “Use Signal.”
However, the actual long-term impact to WhatsApp usage was almost nonexistent. Prior to the incident, WhatsApp announced having “…more than 2 billion users…” and as of January 2026, industry estimates put that number at 2.9 billion. Similar to the Ring pattern, short term sound resulted in very little long-term fury.
Will This Ever Change?
Probably not. Like the movie Groundhog Day, in which forlorn TV weatherman Phil Connors, portrayed by Bill Murray, is doomed endlessly to repeat a February 2nd, consumers are doomed to repeat surveillance overreach and ineffective short term backlash responses. In the movie, the only escape was for Phil to shift from his self-centered world view to one that genuinely cares about others. Some parallel of that, genuinely caring about the impact of broad surveillance on society and acting accordingly and consistently, is the only way of out the panopticon.
