What Ring’s Super Bowl Ad Really Asked Us to Accept
During Super Bowl LX, amid the usual spectacle of celebrity cameos and emotional storytelling, one commercial stood out for reasons far more unsettling than its creators likely intended.
A commercial from Ring, the smart doorbell company owned by Amazon, introduced viewers to a new feature called Search Party — a tool that uses artificial intelligence to scan neighborhood camera footage to locate lost dogs. The ad culminated in a tear-jerking reunion, framed as a triumph of technology and community.
But beneath the sentimental veneer lies a far more consequential question: What are we being asked to normalize?
A Feel-Good Story With Far-Reaching Implications
On its face, the premise is simple. A family loses their dog. Neighbors opt in. Cameras scan footage. The dog is found. Everyone wins.
Yet this framing deliberately narrows the scope of what is actually being presented: a networked, AI-assisted surveillance infrastructure operating at neighborhood scale, marketed not as surveillance, but as compassion.
The ad asks viewers to emotionally associate constant camera coverage with safety, care, and collective good — a powerful narrative shortcut that avoids engaging with deeper ethical concerns.
Surveillance by Consent — Or by Conditioning?
Ring emphasizes that participation in Search Party is voluntary. That matters — but it is not the whole story.
Consent in a surveillance ecosystem is rarely binary. When cameras become ubiquitous, opting out becomes less meaningful. Individuals who choose not to participate are still captured incidentally — walking dogs, visiting neighbors, passing through shared spaces. The normalization of surveillance doesn’t require universal consent; it requires cultural acceptance.
This commercial works to build exactly that acceptance.
The Slippery Expansion Problem
History offers a clear pattern: technologies introduced for limited, benevolent purposes tend to expand.
Ring’s cameras have already been used in partnerships with law enforcement, raising longstanding civil liberties concerns. While Search Party currently focuses on pets, the underlying technology — AI object recognition across vast video networks — is inherently adaptable.
If lost dogs are acceptable, what about:
• identifying “suspicious behavior”?
• tracking individuals?
• flagging people deemed out of place?
The commercial never addresses these questions. Instead, it relies on emotional closure to shut them down.
The Ethics of Emotional Engineering
Super Bowl commercials are cultural artifacts, not just advertisements. They shape public imagination.
By pairing surveillance with love for animals — a near-universal emotional trigger — Ring’s ad doesn’t merely promote a product. It reframes surveillance as moral, even altruistic. That reframing deserves scrutiny, especially at a moment when AI oversight, data privacy, and corporate power remain dangerously underregulated.
Technology does not become ethical simply because its story is touching.
A Broader Cultural Moment
That this message aired during the most-watched broadcast in the United States is not incidental. It reflects a broader cultural pivot: from debating surveillance to absorbing it, provided it arrives wrapped in kindness.
The question is not whether finding lost dogs is good. It is.
The question is whether expanding invisible surveillance networks should be quietly normalized through emotional advertising — without democratic debate, transparent guardrails, or meaningful accountability.
What We Should Be Asking Instead
Rather than applauding the tear-jerker, we might ask:
• Who controls the data?
• How long is footage stored?
• How easily can the system be repurposed?
• What protections exist for those who never consented to be recorded?
These are not fringe concerns. They are the ethical baseline for any technology that watches, records, and analyzes our lives.
Sentiment should never substitute for scrutiny.
The Humane Herald 