Ring Doorbell Camera Ad Asks Users to Opt In to Mass Surveillance Under the Guise of Finding Missing Pets: 'Terrifying'
Things absolutely nobody said while watching Sunday’s Super Bowl:
No. 1: “Forget Tom Brady or Joe Montana — clutch play and throwing accuracy, thy name is Drake Maye.”
No. 2: “Is Bad Bunny Puerto Rican? I dunno, you sure can’t tell from his act.”
No. 3: “You know, there really haven’t been enough AI commercials.”
Yes, the only thing that viewers noticed from the Seattle Seahawks win at Super Bowl LX on Sunday — aside from the fact it was the most lopsided 29-13 game most of us had ever watched and the halftime show contained more Puerto Rican flags than the whole of San Juan — is the fact that virtually every other ad was selling us on the wonders of AI.
It made the saturation of cryptocurrency ads during the Bengals-Rams Super Bowl in 2022 (in the halcyon days before the darkly hilarious unraveling of FTX) look positively quaint.
There was also a unifying undercurrent behind all of these ads: AI is wholly benign, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a wacko. That second part was usually left implicit, although Amazon was all too happy to make it explicit with this odd spot:
Amazon Alexa murders Chris Hemsworth several times over in an unsettling Super Bowl ad.
Strange marketing choice. They basically handed viewers nightmares.
First, Chris imagines Alexa beheading him as she tells him to look under the garage door.
Next, he imagines Alexa saying… pic.twitter.com/A8CCnepY9G
— Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) February 9, 2026
I’d say William Friedkin must be getting desperate, but he’s dead. Anyhow, most of the ads left the we’re-just-doing-good-and-if-you-think-otherwise-you’re-a-weirdo part to our imaginations, none more shamelessly than Ring, makers of those panopticon smart doorbell devices.
See, their point was that you think your Ring device is just for you. But it’s actually for everyone — and that’s a good thing! Because it helps locate pets! You like doggos, don’t you? They’re heckin’ good doggos, yes they are!
Here’s the ad, which basically peddles privatized Big Brother through emotional blackmail:
Here’s that Ring #SuperBowl commercial: pic.twitter.com/1gAxIJATdz
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) February 9, 2026
I’m not sure which is worse, Chris Hemsworth having nightmares about Alexa scheming to kill him or a commercial whose message is “give us real-time video data from your house so we can surveil whatever we want or this little girl’s dog gets run over by a Jeep somewhere out on the interstate.” Neither is good, though, and users on social media seemed to realize this:
If they can do this to find a dog, they can do this to find anyone. That’s terrifying. https://t.co/4PxUeGvU4w
— Brad Lander (@bradlander) February 9, 2026
ring offering to turn your neighborhood into an AI fueled surveillance state under the guise of “helping you find your lost dog” is CRAZY
— brig 🐦🔥 (@82erssy) February 9, 2026
I’ve never had a commercial do the exact opposite effect of what it intended before. I had no opinion on Ring doorbells but now I will actively avoid purchasing one as long as I live https://t.co/rI13KG0rhT
— Schaffrillas (@Schaffrillas) February 9, 2026
I’m not going to speculate on where this goes in the pantheon of worst all-time Super Bowl commercials (the Squarespace “5 to 9” and Apple “Lemmings” commercials still might have something to say about taking a spot in the pantheon of the great Super Bowl advertising bombs of all time), but one can only hope this does to Ring what Mr. Big dying on a treadmill in the “Sex and the City” spinoff did to Peloton.
Even if it doesn’t have that kind of impact, one hopes this at least wakes people up to the realities of AI.
It used to be a popular bromide, if a digital product was being offered free of charge and you didn’t know how the parent company paid the bills (cough cough Facebook cough), that you were the product. You were giving them your data and your information to sell as they chose.
Now, it’s even worse: You can buy or get a paid subscription to a product — quite expensively, too — and still also be the product. That’s the whole business model behind AI. And on Sunday, corporations were all too happy to let you know it — some less subtly than others.
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