Ring cameras banding together to help find missing pets—what’s not to like? But while Ring’s Search Party has a laudable goal, the just-announced functionality is yet another community-minded Ring feature that’s on by default. 

Introduced during Amazon’s big hardware reveal last month, a Search Party gets initiated when a neighbor reports a lost dog via Ring’s Neighbor’s app. (Support for cats and other pets is coming later, Ring says.) When that occurs, other local Ring cameras in the area can join the Search Party, with AI scanning the video footage to help locate the missing pet. 

If your Ring camera finds a potential match (the feature works only with outdoor Ring cameras, not indoor Ring cams), you’ll get an alert with a picture of the dog and the relevant video clips. If you think there’s a match, you can (if you wish) choose to share the videos with the pet owners and/or reach out to them directly. 

Ring’s Search Party feature isn’t slated to go live until November, but banners announcing the functionality have already started appearing in the Ring app, along with a setting—already enabled—that lets you control whether Search Party is active on your Ring cameras. 

In other words, Search Party is on by default, just like Ring’s Community Requests feature, which allows law enforcement to request video clips from Ring users, and Amazon’s Sidewalk networks, which leverage neighborhood Ring cams and Echo speakers to boost the connectivity of nearby IoT devices like motion detectors and pet trackers. 

For its part, Ring promises that “your privacy is always in your control” with Search Party. You’re free to choose which, if any, videos you’d like to share with a neighbor who’s looking for their missing dog, Ring says, and you can also ignore the alerts. And of course, you can always disable Search Party functionality altogether.

How to turn Ring’s Search Party off 

Cutting to the chase, here’s how to opt out of Search Party:

• Open the app, tap the Menu button in the top-left corner of the screen, then tap Control Center. 
• Scroll down to the Community Control section, then tap Search Party > Search for Lost Pets. 
• You’ll arrive at a screen that shows you whether the Search Party feature is active—and if so, which of your Ring cams are participating in the feature. You can disable individual cameras, but you can also disable Search Party altogether by toggling off the Search for Lost Pets setting. 

Why I’d rather opt-in to Search Party rather than opt-out

Look, I get Ring’s rationale for having the Search Party feature enabled by default—after all, the more Ring cameras looking for missing pets, the better, right? I’m sure if my (hypothetical) dog wandered off, I’d want as many Ring cameras looking for it as possible.

That said, I’m not a fan of “opt-out” functionality, even for something as laudable as Search Party. Same goes for Amazon’s Sidewalk and Ring Neighbor’s Community Requests, for that matter.

While I’m happy to pitch in and help someone find their missing pooch—and yes, I’ll be leaving the feature on—I’d prefer to actively volunteer rather than being automatically signed up.  

This article is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.

Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer, TechHive