Amazon-owned Ring and Flock Broke Up. Privacy Experts Ask: Should Schools, Too?

School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

Milo went missing. 

Yet it wasn’t the lost puppy that gave people the jitters — it was the promise behind the story: that a communitywide web of home security systems could transform a neighborhood into a “Search Party.”

The Super Bowl commercial set off public backlash against two leading surveillance companies: Amazon, which owns Ring doorbell cameras, and Flock Safety, which makes license plate reader cameras. Within days, the e-commerce giant announced it was ditching a planned partnership with Atlanta-based Flock.

Privacy advocates said the breakup represented a rare, high-profile retreat from the expansion of surveillance-driven policing — and that school leaders should take note.

“The fact that Amazon is reconsidering their relationship with Flock should be a very large and glaring sign that schools should also perhaps reconsider that relationship,” said Kristin Woelfel, policy counsel for equity in civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

In an investigation last week, The 74 revealed that police nationwide routinely tapped into school district Flock cameras to assist President Donald Trump’s mass immigration crackdown, which has also led to public outcry and protest over the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s unprecedented surveillance tactics.

Click here to read the full story. You can also listen to me talk about my latest reporting on the K12 Tech Talk podcast and on Your Call Media Roundtable on San Francisco’s KALW public radio.

In the news

The latest in Trump’s immigration crackdown: A Georgia elementary school teacher was killed this week while driving to work when a man being chased by federal immigration agents rammed into her vehicle. | Georgia Recorder

• Conservative advocacy group Defending Education has built a database of some 700 school districts nationally that have adopted policies restricting federal immigration agents’ access to campuses. | Fox News

• U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, who repeatedly denied that federal agents were targeting schools, is stepping down. | The New York Times

Instagram and other Meta-owned social media apps have navigated youth safety “in a reasonable way,” company CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified Wednesday in a courtroom filled with parents who have accused the company and other tech giants of hooking their children on the platforms and decimating their mental health. | CNN

‘Worried that I was going to die’: Georgia high schoolers opened up this week about the horrors of getting shot during the 2024 Apalachee High School shooting that led to the deaths of two teachers and two students. Students’ testimonies came during a criminal trial accusing the alleged shooter’s father of recklessness and failure to prevent the tragedy. | WABE

Should schools call child protective services on students who are chronically absent? Debate has ensued. | The New York Times

• A Georgia father has been arrested on allegations that each of his two sons has missed nearly 400 days of school. One is an elementary school student, while the other is in middle school. | KPTV

In a significant departure from past years, the Education Department’s civil rights division didn’t close any sexual harassment and assault cases involving K-12 schools in 2025, after the Trump administration slashed the agency and purged its caseload. | K-12 Dive

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