Ring Nixes Partnership with Flock Safety to Share Doorbell Footage with Police - DTH

Ring has officially terminated its proposed partnership with Flock Safety, a collaboration that would have enabled law enforcement utilizing Flock’s system to request video footage directly from Ring doorbell owners. This decision, announced February 13, 2026, follows significant public backlash and controversy surrounding a recent Super Bowl advertisement, marking a distinct retreat from the Amazon-owned company's history of close collaboration with police departments.

Key Points

• Ring canceled its integration with Flock Safety, citing resource constraints, following privacy concerns and public outcry.
• ByteDance is reportedly selling its Shanghai Moonton Technology studio to the Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group for an estimated $6-7 billion.
• Meta plans to reintroduce facial recognition technology to its smart glasses, five years after discontinuing similar features due to privacy issues.
• The White House is moving to add Alibaba to the Pentagon’s 1268 list, prohibiting U.S. defense agencies from contracting with the Chinese tech giant.

Privacy Concerns Drive Strategic Shifts

The cancellation of the Ring-Flock Safety partnership represents a significant pivot in the consumer surveillance market. The integration, which was never fully launched, would have utilized the "community request" feature to bridge residential video feeds with Flock's automated license plate reader network. According to Ring, the decision to mutually call off the deal was based on the project requiring more time and resources than anticipated. The company explicitly confirmed that no customer footage was shared with Flock Safety during the development phase.

Conversely, Meta is pushing forward with biometric data integration. The company intends to launch "Name Tag," a facial recognition feature for its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, as early as this year. This feature will leverage Meta’s AI assistant to identify individuals and present information to the wearer. To mitigate the ethical and civil liberties concerns that led to the shutdown of its previous facial recognition system five years ago, Meta is reportedly exploring strict limitations, such as restricting identification to the user’s contacts or public figures.

Global Market Consolidation and Geopolitics

In a massive move for the gaming industry, ByteDance—the parent company of TikTok—is nearing a deal to divest its gaming arm, Shanghai Moonton Technology. The buyer, Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group, is expected to pay between $6 billion and $7 billion. This sale signals ByteDance's exit from the online gaming sector while consolidating Savvy's aggressive growth strategy. Savvy, a subsidiary of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), gains access to Moonton’s 1.5 billion global installs and 110 million monthly active users.

Meanwhile, trade tensions between the U.S. and China are poised to escalate. The Biden administration is preparing to place Alibaba on the Pentagon's 1268 list due to alleged ties to the Chinese military. While this designation does not carry formal economic sanctions, it effectively bans the Department of Defense from procuring goods or services from the listed entities, signaling a hardening stance from Washington despite recent trade truces.

AI Hardware and Software Evolution

OpenAI has released a technical preview of its newest model, GPT-5.3 "Codec Spark." Breaking from the industry standard, this model runs on Cerebras non-Nvidia hardware. Designed specifically for coding tasks, the model boasts a 128,000 token context window and generation speeds reaching 1,000 tokens per second—approximately 15 times faster than its predecessor. While it reportedly outperforms older models like GPT-5.1 on software engineering benchmarks, it still trails the raw processing power of Anthropic’s Cloud Opus 4.6 in premium modes.

"This vulnerability, inherent to open access LLMs, will likely threaten smaller companies' custom LLMs, especially those trained on sensitive data."

The rapid proliferation of AI is also exposing new security vectors. Google has warned that its Gemini chatbot is facing "distillation attacks," where competitors or bad actors query the system hundreds of thousands of times to extract proprietary patterns. This "model extraction" technique allows copycats to replicate complex AI behaviors without incurring the massive R&D costs of training a foundation model from scratch.

Autonomous Logistics Adjustments

In a pragmatic solution to a high-tech problem, Waymo and DoorDash have launched a pilot program in Atlanta. DoorDash drivers are now receiving a guaranteed $11.25 bonus to physically close the doors of Waymo self-driving vehicles if a passenger leaves them open, as the autonomous units cannot operate with ajar doors. This low-tech fix aims to maximize fleet efficiency as autonomous delivery networks expand.