Ring kills herd safety deal after Super Bowl ad uproar

Widespread protests in Iran have exposed Tehran’s brutal tactics on the streets, where state authorities have killed thousands of protesters since early January, and extreme measures to block access to the global internet.

As it has done repeatedly in the past, the Iranian regime cut off the country’s population from the global Internet during the recent anti-government uprising. But it also blocked access to the country’s intranet, known as the National Information Network, which new research finds has become a mechanism for constant and comprehensive surveillance that may ultimately be the only way Iranians can connect to the Internet.

The last remaining major nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia has just expired. So what will replace it? Artificial intelligence, of course. At least that’s what some researchers think. Combined with satellite images and human auditors, AI-powered systems could replace in-person inspections of countries’ nuclear facilities. There are clearly flaws in this plan.

Cryptocurrencies may only be 16 years old, but they have already become the preferred form of cash for the world’s worst people. Cryptocurrency tracking firm Chainalysis revealed this week that blockchain-based transactions linked to the sale of human beings for prostitution and forced fraud have nearly doubled over the past year, with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions annually. Chain analysis researchers say this amount is likely an underestimate.

While the Trump administration says it is working to scale back increased immigration enforcement in Minnesota, damage continues to be done to that state’s US court system. A WIRED analysis found that court filings aimed at giving people a chance to be released from ICE detention skyrocketed in January, leaving U.S. attorneys stretched to the breaking point and leaving people in jail beyond the time they should have been released.

Meanwhile, Customs and Border Protection signed a $225,000 deal with Clearview AI that gives Border Patrol intelligence units access to the company’s facial recognition technology.

And that’s not all. Every week we round up security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in depth ourselves. Click on the titles to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Ring again pushes back on the public’s aversion to mass surveillance. In an announcement first reported by The Verge, Ring explained that after a “thorough review,” it decided that its plan to integrate its sprawling network of privately owned surveillance cameras with Flock Safety, a company that sells license plate reader technology to police departments across the US, “will require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”

“The integration never went live, so no Ring customer videos were sent to Flock Safety,” Ring said.

The cancellation of its partnership with Flock comes just days after the company aired an ad during the Super Bowl showcasing its new Search Party feature that “uses artificial intelligence to help families find lost dogs.” Many people reacted to this feature by asking, “If a search team can find missing dogs, surely they’ll be used to hunt people down too, right?”

Ring, which has been owned by Amazon since 2018, has drawn condemnation for years from privacy advocates for its partnerships with police departments and a tool in its Neighbors app that allowed authorities to obtain surveillance footage directly from people who installed Ring cameras rather than through any judicially controlled process, such as obtaining a warrant. The company scrapped the tool in early 2024. Flock sparked similar outrage over its surveillance network which, according to 404 Media, ICE surreptitiously exploited as part of its relentless pursuit to remove immigrants from U.S. soil.

Facial recognition is not having a great moment in American society: Democratic lawmakers have asked ICE to stop using facial recognition technology on the streets, and ICE itself continues to be horrified by the prospect of people using it with its agents.

This “dynamic political environment,” said an internal Meta memo obtained by The Times, is one in which Meta may update its smart glasses to include a new facial recognition feature that has been referred to internally as “name tag.”