Ring-Leader of Surveillance: The Privacy Concerns Behind Fast-Growing Monitoring Technology

Ring-Leader of Surveillance: The Privacy Concerns Behind Fast-Growing Monitoring Technology

Super Bowl LX, on Sunday, February 8th 2026, while most notable for the Seattle Seahawk’s defeat of the New England Patriots, also saw many advertisements about Artificial Intelligence (AI) that caught the attention of spectators. Nestled between the advertisements on Pringles and energy drinks was a commercial on the widespread surveillance company Ring. The advertisement — aptly named Search Party — detailed a dog named Milo that went missing from the neighborhood, to the devastation of the little girl who owns it. The ad then explains a solution: Ring Search Party, wherein posting a dog’s photo in the app will lead to Ring cameras tracking down the dog using AI until it is found.
Though the advertisement ends with Milo being found, and a happy family as a result, the broader implications may not be as positive. Widespread use of artificial intelligence surveillance, even if purportedly to find a missing dog, begs the question of whether law enforcement utilizing such private records constitute a “search” that would circumvent the need to obtain a warrant. The Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence provides a starting point, but not a clear answer. In Katz v. United States (1967), the Court held that the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places, and articulated the now-canonical “reasonable expectation of privacy” test. Yet, Katz presupposed a world in which surveillance is discrete, human, and episodic. By contrast, AI-powered systems like Ring’s Search Party aggregate vast amounts of privately collected footage tracking across entire neighborhoods. In this paper, I argue that the increasing use of surveillance technology, like Ring doorbell cameras, creates a gap in Fourth Amendment doctrine by complicating what a “reasonable expectation of privacy” would mean in a new, digitized world.
The rapid expansion of AI-powered tracking exposes the limits of traditional Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, which was developed in a world of far more discrete and human-led surveillance. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution lays out a prohibition against searches that are unreasonable in nature, holding that “the right of the people to be secure……against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized” [1]. At its very core, the Amendment protects individuals’ reasonable expectations of privacy. In Katz, focusing on the government’s wiretapping of a public payphone to eavesdrop upon a private conversation, ruled that physical entry is not necessary to constitute an unreasonable search. The Court explicated what a “reasonable expectation of privacy” entails, declaring that the Fourth Amendment “protects people, not places.” Justice Harlan distilled the doctrine in a two-pronged test: the subjective expectation of privacy, and the objective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable [2]. Building off of Katz, different courts have attempted to evaluate the need for a reasonable expectation of privacy as vastly differing based on the various circumstances and developing technology. The Open Fields Doctrine, instituted as a result of Hester v. United States (1927), held that the Fourth Amendment’s protections did not apply to ‘open fields,’ such as vacant lots or wooded areas. The Open Fields Doctrine was clarified in Olivier v. United States (1984), applying legal warrantless searches even to fields with fences. In the words of the Olivier majority, one “may not legitimately demand privacy for activities conducted out of doors in fields, except in the area immediately surrounding the home” [3]. Essentially, locations outside the immediate vicinity of the home would not be protected; at the same time, areas in or directly around the home are subject to high expectations of privacy, which would need a warrant for searches.
While Ring was initially founded as a smart home security company, it has since evolved into a sprawling surveillance infrastructure. The company has come a long way since its founding in 2013 as DoorBot and its rejection by the Sharks of Shark Tank. Since then, it has grown exponentially, and was bought by Amazon for $1 billion dollars in 2018. Today, the company sells a myriad of products, from outdoor and indoor cameras to doorbells and alarms, all part of a fortified network that is supposed to keep homeowners safe. The company’s website promotes new features such as “alarms that don’t play by the old rules,” 4K panorama views, and its use of Artificial Intelligence to, for example, assist cameras in detecting fires on a campground [4]. Ring’s partnership with law enforcement has also increased in the past years, with their Community Requests platform allowing officers to request video recordings from the cameras, subject to homeowners’ approval [5]. Warrants can also be requested for video camera information, just as with any non-technology medium.
Applying the Katz test shows that the waters are muddied between reasonable surveillance and unconstitutional surveillance. For example, individuals in a neighbor’s camera having a subjective expectation of privacy may depend on one’s exact location. A neighbor crossing the street has little expectation of privacy, yet a person grilling in their own backyard captured by a neighbor’s camera creates some intrusion of privacy. What could ostensibly be a family Fourth of July celebration is now footage and potentially evidence in a criminal case that could be brought for any reason. What may be legally sound, however, is different from social norms: generally, even people walking in the street do not enjoy being recorded and expect some privacy when walking through the street, and in a culture based on individual rights, they have reason to believe so. Cases on technology and privacy yielded various results: Kyllo v. United States (2001) held that using thermal imaging to search a house violated the 4th Amendment [6]. People v. Tafoya (2021), in the state of Colorado, held that a warrantless search of a house by using a utility pole camera violated the 4th Amendment [7]. Finally, Carpenter v. United States (2018), ruled that getting a week’s worth of cell-site information was a search needing a warrant [8].
Current Fourth Amendment tests, however, don’t take into account the rise of Artificial Intelligence in surveillance and the rapid technology changes that have occurred in the last four years. Networked door-to-door surveillance create a gray area that Katz, a case from 1967, is simply not able to account for. The normalization of constant recording — from people using their phones to record everything from parties to incidents — creates a culture in which privacy is watered down, deemphasized, and deprioritized in favor of more surveillance. The cameras on our doors and those in our hands create conditions that the framers would have never imagined when writing the Fourth Amendment. Does being secure in their “persons, papers, houses, and effects” include digital footage, or is that not the intent of those who wrote the amendment? There was no AI in 1776, no computers, no surveillance companies whose data could easily be shared with law enforcement. An analysis of history and tradition falls short in this subject precisely because the words “technology” and “cameras” are nowhere in the Constitution; and because searches and seizure, quite literally, meant the authorities physically barging into one’s house, the Court will have to further clarify this gray area to create a reasonable standard for privacy expectations in technology.
Privacy is, all in all, an important value of society dating back to the English tradition that “a man’s house is his castle” [9]. Rebelling against British intrusions on the Colonists’ property and the constant searches that occurred during the Revolutionary war, the Founders saw it as pertinent to include the Fourth Amendment among the Bill of Rights, ensuring that privacy rights would be legally protected and enshrined in law. The current crossroads of surveillance and technology create a new need for Court involvement — an expansion of the Katz doctrine to include the potential actions of a company like Ring, to clearly lay out the limits of surveillance, which if fallen into the wrong hands, could easily lead to a 1984-type situation in which "nothing [would be] your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull" [10]. The Super Bowl advertisement was eye-opening, as thirty seconds showed the nation what modern technology is capable of, and laid bare the need to incorporate it into existing jurisprudence.

References

[1] U.S. Const. Amend. IV.

[2] Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967).

[3] Olivier v. United States, 466 U.S. 170 (1984).

[4] “Home Security Systems - Cameras, Alarms, Doorbells.” Ring. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://ring.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqcgbwTT5WBVy7dM9nhKI5gOjAtix-kVZw-8KyoH8WghXeOFFBh.

[5] Rosenbaum, Eric. “Amazon Ring Security Cameras Moving Deeper into Law Enforcement with Flock Safety, Axon Deals.” CNBC, October 17, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/16/amazon-ring-cameras-surveillance-law-enforcement-crime-police-investigations.html.

[5] Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001).

[6] Colorado v. Tafoya, 2021 CO 62 (2021).

[7] Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. __ (2018).

[9] “Historical Background on Fourth Amendment.” Legal Information Institute. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/historical-background-on-fourth-amendment.

[10] “1984.” George Orwell - 1984 - Part 1, Chapter 2. Accessed March 13, 2026. https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/1.html.