Ring has been getting plenty of critical press lately, with concerns over local police and federal law enforcement potentially gaining access to sensitive surveillance camera footage across the country. Anti-ICE activists have been calling for a boycott over Ring’s announcement that it would be cooperating with Flock Safety, which has built a nationwide surveillance network used by police to track license plates. And it’s not like any of these concerns are really new. Ring has gotten heat over privacy concerns for most of its existence, though there’s renewed interest in how surveillance tech is being used in 2026 as federal agents terrorize cities like Minneapolis, threatening anyone who isn’t white with deportation and executing observers in the streets.
It’s against this backdrop of bad PR that Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon, has expanded a feature that helps people find their lost dogs. And while the company credits the feature with helping find roughly one dog per day, a laudable achievement, no doubt celebrated by pet owners across the country, it comes at a time when every American is trying to weigh the pros and cons of blanketing the globe with cameras watching our every move.
“Ring has expanded Search Party for Dogs, an AI-powered community feature that enables your outdoor Ring cameras to help reunite lost dogs with their families, to anyone in the U.S. who needs help finding their lost pup,” Amazon said in a press release posted online Monday.
The Search Party feature allows Ring users to put out an alert to neighbors within the Ring ecosystem when their dog has gone missing, similar to existing apps like PawBoost. And neighbors can opt in to have their own camera on the lookout for any dog that might look similar. The feature has been expanded to allow people without Ring cameras to download the app and post their missing dog as well.
Everyone can get behind the idea of helping find lost dogs. But the feature feels like a PR move that pulls attention from the threat of omnipresent surveillance in an ostensibly free society: the fact that every American’s device can be turned against them in an instant. If you don’t like it, well, I guess you like lost dogs.
Ring says federal law enforcement is not given access to the features that allow authorities to request access to footage from Ring users. The company explains that local police must make a relatively narrow request for footage in a specific geographic area and a time-bound request within a 12-hour span. Police also need to provide an investigation number and explain what kind of crime they’re investigating, something that users can search for themselves if they’re trying to decide whether to provide their own footage to the cops. A spokesperson for Ring told Gizmodo on Monday that they hadn’t seen any requests related to immigration and that if the company found a local police department surreptitiously providing an agency like ICE with security footage, it would cut off that department from access.
“Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos, feeds, or back-end access, and does not share video with them,” Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels told Gizmodo in a statement.
But those safeguards might be cold comfort in a political environment where the U.S. federal government doesn’t seem bound by any rules. A judge in Minnesota recently noted that ICE violated nearly 100 court orders in the state during January alone.
Authorities can also get footage directly from Ring through a judicial warrant, and the company told Gizmodo that an administrative warrant isn’t sufficient.
“Like all companies, Ring may receive legally valid and binding demands for information from law enforcement, such as search warrants, subpoenas, or court orders,” said Daniels. “We do not disclose customer information unless required to do so by law, or in rare emergency situations when there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury. Outside of that legal process, customers control which videos are shared with law enforcement.”
Judicial warrants are issued by real judges who are part of the judicial branch, as opposed to immigration “judges” that are housed under the executive branch and the U.S. Department of Justice. The distinction matters because administrative warrants aren’t sufficient to demand entry into a private residence. However, the New York Times broke news last week that ICE has told its agents that administrative warrants are enough to go storming into any house they like.
All of which is to say that when the rules are breaking down, it’s important to pay attention to what private individuals and companies do in the face of tyranny. Will Ring really pull the plug if ICE tries to abuse its power or gain access to footage through a local police department? We don’t really know. And as we all get used to being constantly on video thanks to a combination of state surveillance and private cameras, it makes sense that a company like Ring would want to highlight the positives of our global panopticon.
One positive? It’s easier to help your neighbors find Fido. Unfortunately, it might also help the feds find your neighbor.
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#Amazons #Ring #Wash #Surveillance #Concerns #Lost #Puppies

![‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos
Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones… happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences. While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_44FFKZ1M[/embed] Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.
The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8p6YkEPVco[/embed] I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season. Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital! Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV — VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026 So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.
Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them. In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2p_B5MD0c[/embed] It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:
It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions. While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media ‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos
Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones… happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences. While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_44FFKZ1M[/embed] Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.
The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8p6YkEPVco[/embed] I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season. Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital! Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV — VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026 So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.
Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them. In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2p_B5MD0c[/embed] It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:
It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions. While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/Alice-in-Borderland-1280x853.jpg)
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