New Ring cameras get Search Party feature that can find lost dogs – but there’s a catch

Amongst its many new product launches, Ring has recently announced a new app feature that can help you find lost dogs in your area. Ring’s new Search Party feature works with your outdoor cameras and uses AI to identify and locate lost pets – but there’s a bit of a catch.

Amazon’s live event took place last week, and it revealed many new smart home products, including Echo, Ring and Blink devices. The Ring announcements included new 2K and 4K indoor and outdoor security cameras, and video doorbells. The new Ring cameras and doorbells are compatible with the Ring app which comes with plenty of handy features, including the new Search Party.

Search Party is an AI-powered feature that allows your Ring outdoor security cameras to help identify and locate lost dogs. If a neighbour or someone within your community reports a dog missing in the Ring app, nearby Ring cameras will automatically scan their surroundings to find a match.

Ring’s AI Search Party feature searches for dogs that look like the one reported in the app, and if it finds a possible match, it’ll alert you with the missing dog’s photo and your camera footage. You can choose to ignore the alert or share the information with the missing dog’s owners – I’d hope we’d all pick the latter!

So, what could possibly be the catch here? Well, Search Party is a feature that’s enabled by default, rather than Ring camera and app users enabling it themselves. Users were emailed about the upcoming feature and ‘You can always turn off Search Party’ was included in the wording, which caused users to speculate that it’d be automatically switched on for their cameras when the feature arrives.

This might not sound like a big deal but some users felt that the Search Party feature wasn’t optional and would be added to their cameras whether they liked it or not. As the feature almost works in the background scanning your footage, many worry about their privacy and video being shared without consent which has been a concern in the past.

As Ring has stated that you’ll get the option to share your footage, this hopefully shouldn’t be an issue. The new Search Party feature is rolling out to users in the US in November, and is compatible with Ring doorbells, spotlight, floodlight, stick-up and outdoor cameras.