Amazon Ring security cameras moving deeper into law enforcement with Flock Safety, Axon deals
The FlockOS software in use within law enforcement, and where the Ring Community Requests will originate.
Flock Safety
Amazon’s Ring security cameras are moving deeper into law enforcement work in a new deal with Flock Safety that will allow citizens who own Ring cameras to share footage that can assist in crime investigations, making the video available to law enforcement that use Flock’s software.
It’s the second recent deal bringing the Amazon Ring security tech into the law enforcement market in new ways, with Ring also recently announcing a similar effort with Axon Enterprise.
Flock, a direct Axon competitor, works with an estimated 6,000 communities and 5,000 law enforcement agencies, and sees a “long tail” for the tech in the public safety sector with an estimated 17,000 cities across the U.S., according to its CEO and founder Garrett Langley.
Flock Safety ranked No. 7 on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
The Ring Community Requests feature will be available for use with the FlockOS and Flock Nova platforms that are contracted by local public safety agencies. That will enable law enforcement officers to directly request video evidence from Ring cameras, but citizens will make the decision whether to share video. Police requests will go into what is called the Ring Neighbors feed, which pings camera users within an area identified as relevant to the crime, and camera owners can then share video, which is kept in a secure environment and can only be used for the single crime investigation.
“For me, it is clear and obvious we have a crime problem in America,” Langley said. “We are focused on businesses and cities, and Ring is definitely a leader in home security. Being able to partner with them will lead to much safer communities, and doing it in a way that allows the public to opt in,” he said, adding that it was Ring that first reached out to Flock Safety about a potential deal.
The law enforcement technology market, and surveillance cameras in particular, are by their nature controversial, with concerns about privacy, racial profiling, use of surveillance information for unapproved purposes, and weak security protocols. This is not the first attempt by Ring to more broadly distribute video footage. A previous incarnation of this type of technology, Ring Request for Assistance, was shut down in 2024. According to Consumer Reports, that tool was used by at least 2,500 police agencies. Ring has also worked directly with law enforcement in the past to distribute cameras in communities.
Langley said there is a key difference between RFA and the new Community Requests feature. “RFA was inside the Ring data app. There was no chain of custody,” he said. “In this case, while the request goes out in the Ring app, any footage shared by users goes into the Flock platform, which is fully secure,” he said. “This is what we do every day for businesses and municipalities,” he added. In addition to public agency work, Flock has contracts with an estimated 1,000 private sector organizations for its technology.
While Ring does not release precise data on the number of cameras in use, Langley said it is a major advantage to law enforcement to have this option in crime investigations, and law agencies have been asking for it, given the fact that there can be tens of thousands of Ring cameras in communities across the country.
A 2023 report from Politico estimated 10 million Americans with Ring cameras for their homes.
Ring could not be immediately reached for comment.
Ring security cameras are displayed on a shelf at a Best Buy store on June 01, 2023 in San Rafael, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Langley says he sees the development as a better option for both the police and the public compared to the current way crime work is conducted. “It’s about helping law enforcement be more efficient and conduct faster investigations,” he said. And for citizens, he said, “If there’s a shooting in my neighborhood today and police go door-to-door asking if you have camera footage, it can create an environment where it is hard to say no.”
“This is an environment where people will have control. They don’t have to participate in any specific request and that level of control didn’t exist beforehand,” Langley said. “The alternative is a cop shows up at your front door and people feel quite compelled, and now law enforcement has a more efficient way and we as citizens are able to say ‘no, we don’t want to help,’ for whatever reason.”
The partnership has no direct revenue impact on Flock Safety, with Langley saying it will be offered for free to every law enforcement customer. “If we achieve the mission of helping communities, we will find ways to make money. We won’t monetize this partnership, but we believe it will drive adoption of core products,” he said. “It will be turned on for free for every customer, and I think all of them will use it,” he added.
Flock Safety currently supports law enforcement in making close to one million arrests a year, and “this will help that number go up,” Langley said.
An exact date for the rollout on the Flock platform is not set, but Flock Safety says it is imminent.
Surveillance technology and public debate over crime and safety
It’s sure to attract scrutiny. In addition to controversies involving Ring, including an FTC settlement over allegations of lax security, communities across the U.S. continue to debate the use of technology like Flock’s, with some contracts being canceled amid public debate even as the business is growing.
Langley says for some critics, such as privacy focused organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which have long criticized Ring and similar technologies, there is no reasonable debate left to hold. “There is a certain part of the country that just doesn’t prioritize safety, and like us, Jamie [Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who recently returned to active leadership of the company] does, and I believe everyone has a right to be safe and people should be held accountable if they commit a crime,” Langley said.
For critics of use of surveillance technology in law enforcement, “There is nothing we can do other than shut down our business,” Langley said. “They live in a world of hypotheticals and I live in a world of realities, and we have to do something about it.”
EFF argues that the reality of surveillance technology is uncovering abuses.
“Of course people have a right to be safe, but what companies like Flock and Ring fail to acknowledge is that their technology doesn’t make people safer, it just subjects them to a round-the-clock warrantless digital dragnet that keeps tabs on everyone whether or not they’re suspected of any crime,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Jennifer Pinsof. “That’s an affront to our freedoms, and a recipe for abuse and real harm especially in increasingly authoritarian times. Privacy isn’t dangerous, but giving privacy up for a false sense of security is very dangerous,” she added.
The market has certainly sent a signal that it sees the business as a good one, with Axon’s stock price up 500% over the past five years and 50% this year alone.
Public sentiment over crime levels remains elevated, though subject to partisan leanings, at a time when both leading tech CEOs and President Trump are weighing in on having federal troops police cities.
A recent AP poll found that two-thirds of the public think crime in the U.S. is a major problem, a feeling that is even higher within cities (81%). There is more support for this view among Republicans (96%), but a majority of Democrats (68%) feel similarly about cities. A 2024 Pew Research poll found more Americans prioritizing crime as an issue versus when Joe Biden first took office, across both parties, but it also found Americans tend to view crime as being worse nationally than in their own local communities. Gallup research from 2024 found a decline from a 2023 reading on public concern about crime, which had reached the highest in its polling history.
Langley says political momentum is on the side of Flock Safety and increased use of technology in law enforcement. “Look at the political tides. We tried the social experiment of being soft on crime and it didn’t end well,” he said.
Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at list-making companies and their innovative founders.
Meta Ray-Ban Gen 2 AI glasses during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
EssilorLuxottica said a healthy amount of its revenue growth in the third quarter was due to its partnership with Meta, primarily from its Ray-Ban brand, to develop and sell smart glasses.
“Clearly there is a lift coming from Ray-Ban Meta wearables as a product category,” CFO Stefano Grassi said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.
The European eyewear company said sales in in the quarter grew 11.7% year-over-year to 6.9 billion euros (about $8 billion) from 6.44 billion euros a year earlier. Of that growth, more than 4 percentage points came from wearables, which includes the Meta products, the company said.
In 2019, Meta and Luxottica inked a deal for Ray-Ban Meta branded smart glasses. Most recently, Luxottica’s Oakley brand has joined the partnership, with the debut in June of the Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses. The companies are also working on a version of the smart glasses to be released under the Prada brand, CNBC reported in June.
Luxottica, which also oversees several popular brands like Vogue Eyewear and Persol, has been heavily pushing internet-connected glasses that work with Meta’s AI-powered digital assistant. The technology allows users to play music, take photos and perform other actions similar to how they would use smartphones.
“We believe that glasses will be the future,” Grassi said, adding that the wearables business is profitable. “Glasses will materially replace most of the functionality that today we have embedded into our phones.”
Grassi’s statement echoes sentiments expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said in July that “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”
A couple weeks into the fourth quarter, Grassi said he has “a good degree of optimism” for the period, in part because of the rollout of “all the new products that have been recently presented at the Meta Connect,” which will “all play a role in our fourth-quarter profile.”
At the Connect event in September, Zuckerberg revealed the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which have a small digital display that can be manipulated with an accompanying wristband powered by neural technology.
The company also unveiled new smart glasses, including the $499 Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses and the $379 Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) glasses.
Grassi said that Luxottica’s sales growth in North America in the third quarter had more to do with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses than the effects of tariffs, which led to higher prices for its products.
He said the company will be able to reach the 10 million unit capacity that it had originally planned to hit by the end of 2026 earlier than anticipated.
“The overall ecosystem of wearables is going to bring not only revenue associated with the hardware but also the revenue associated with lenses” and over time from services tied to AI.
EssilorLuxottica shares rose 2.4% on Thursday.
Meta isn’t the only tech giant getting into the burgeoning smart glasses market.
Alphabet announced in May a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker to develop smart glasses powered by Google’s Gemini AI digital assistant, while China’s Alibaba unveiled its smart glasses in July that utilize its Quark AI assistant. Apple and OpenAI are also reportedly developing smart glasses.
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk, center, speaks on a media tour of the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025. Stargate is a collaboration of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank, with promotional support from President Donald Trump, to build data centers and other infrastructure for artificial intelligence throughout the US.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle shares ended Thursday trading up 3% as it called for more business in core categories and confirmed a cloud-computing deal with social media company Meta.
The maker of database software sees $20 billion in artificial intelligence-powered database and AI data platform revenue in the 2030 fiscal year, up from $2.4 billion in fiscal 2025 and $3 billion in fiscal 2026.
“You see the change in these numbers that it’s a little bit easier for us to find supply, not this year or next year, but in subsequent years,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two new CEOs, told analysts Thursday at the company’s AI World conference in Las Vegas. “So as we’re able to find that supply, customers contract for it, we see immense demand, and then we go about delivering that to customers.”
Magouyrk said that in 30 days during the current quarter, Oracle contracted $65 billion in new cloud infrastructure commitments.
“It was across seven different contracts from four different customers,” Magouyrk said. “None of those customers are OpenAI. I know some people are questioning sometimes, ‘Hey, is it just OpenAI? The reality is, we think OpenAI is a great customer, but we have many customers.”
Meta which operates Facebook and Insatgram is one of the four customers, he said. Bloomberg reported in September that the two companies were discussing a $20 billion deal.
The deal with Meta comes amid a flurry of spending by tech companies to invest in the infrastructure for their AI initiatives. Meta in July said that it expects to spend between $66 billion and $72 billion this year in capital expenditures.
In recent years, Oracle has expanded its cloud infrastructure division that competes with the likes of Amazon and Google. At the same time, Oracle has started offering its database in clouds other than its own.
Oracle secured a commitment from OpenAI in excess of $300 billion in July.
AI infrastructure has an adjusted gross margin of 30% to 40% after land, data center, power and computing equipment costs, Oracle said. Earlier this month, The Information reported that Oracle saw a 14% gross margin on renting out Nvidia AI chips in the August quarter.
“I’ve read a lot of stories that are speculating that Oracle is chasing revenue for revenue’s sake, but let’s be crystal clear,” said Doug Kehring, the company’s principal financial officer. “We only pursue opportunities where we have a clear line of sight to attractive market margins that reward us for intellectual property and the activity we bring to customers.”
After market close, Oracle said it’s now targeting $21 in adjusted earnings per share on $225 billion in revenue for fiscal 2030, representing a 31% compound annual growth rate. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $18.92 per share on $198.39 billion in revenue. The stock slipped 2% in extended trading.
WATCH: Oracle kicks off its analyst day to outline deliverables and margin profile
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024