The ad showed a new feature from Ring called Search Party. It uses a network of Ring cameras to scour neighborhoods for signs of lost dogs. But as details of leaked internal Ring emails reported by 404 Media revealed, the service could eventually be used to find other animals and people as well.
The ad was widely criticized on social media and in the tech press, with Search Party essentially being called out as a thinly-disguised neighborhood surveillance network. People are also destroying their Ring cameras in public. In response, Ring immediately canceled its partnership with controversial AI surveillance company Flock. Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff has been on an apology tour since the Super Bowl ad aired. (A Ring spokesperson acknowledged our request for comment and said the company would provide a comment shortly; we’ll update this story when we hear back.)
The Fulu Foundation, a group founded by repair advocate and YouTuber Lewis Rossman, offers rewards to people who can remove anti-user features on connected devices. The nonprofit saw this response as a moment of opportunity for people to take back control over their devices.
“It’s been an interesting moment for people to really understand the compromises they had to accept when they installed these security doorbell cameras,” says Kevin O’Reilly, co-founder of Fulu. “People who install security cameras are looking for more security, not less. At the end of the day, control is at the heart of security. If we don’t control our data, we don’t control our devices.”
Fulu’s latest bounty is for Ring’s video doorbell cameras, intended to encourage hackers and tinkerers to disable software features that require devices to send data to Amazon. The reward is a potential payout of $10,000 or more.
To receive the prize, the winner must comply with certain requirements designed to ensure that the hardware itself remains in working condition. After modifications, the device should be able to work with a local PC or server, and intercept data sent to Amazon servers or require a connection to other Amazon hardware. All this must be done without disabling on-device hardware features like motion detection and color night vision. The task must be completed in less than an hour with “readily available and inexpensive tooling” and “instructions that a moderately technical user can complete”.
“This should be a weekend project,” says O’Reilly, “where someone who is nervous about an ad and wants to take back control can take care of it, get it done, and sleep easy at night knowing they’re the only ones who can see their footage.”
The first person to accomplish all this with a Ring camera and prove they can do it gets the money. The reward starts at $10,000, but will likely grow as donors contribute more money (it’s already near $11,000 at the time of publication). Additionally, Fulu will award an additional $10,000 to be matched by donation to the winner.
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