There were several terrible ads this Super Bowl, but the one from Ring, Amazon’s security camera system, was easily the creepiest and most unsettling of the bunch—selling neighborhood surveillance under the guise of being a “hero.”

The commercial touts Ring’s “Search Party” feature that purportedly helps people find their lost pups: post a photo of your pet, and, with the help of AI, every outdoor Ring camera in the neighborhood is activated to spot Spot.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media calls this feature “dystopian surveillance accelerationism”:

It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant.

Koebler quotes Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author, who called the ad and feature “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”

Ring has long cozied up to cops, recounts Koebler:

The company threw parties for police, employees wore “FUCK CRIME” shirts to internal parties, and helped police facilitate the retrieval of footage from its customers’ cameras if they initially refused to cooperate. It helped police set up elaborate, completely useless package “sting” operations designed to catch criminals but that did not result in any arrests. Ring gave cops devices that they could raffle off to people in their towns, gave police “heat maps” of where its customers lived, used its social media accounts to post footage of supposed suspicious people, and incentivized customers to create “Digital Neighborhood Watch” groups that could earn them swag if they used their Ring cameras to report suspicious activity to police.

Ring is using sentimentality—lost puppies, forlorn kids—to entice us into (willingly) building out a massive surveillance state. First the family pet, next the suspicious stranger. It’s not being paranoid to imagine ICE seeking access to these cameras to track the movements of immigrant families, protesters, or other “persons of interest.”

The Ring ad notes that 10 million pets go missing a year, but thanks to this new feature, “more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family.”

Given this is a marketing campaign, that “more than” claim probably means 366 to 548 dogs (more than that and they would have said “nearly two dogs a day”). At the (very generous) high end, that’s a paltry 0.00548% reunion rate—five and a half thousandths of a percent. If we allow for a whopping 100x increase in found pups following the widespread adoption of this feature, this dystopian technology will reunite perhaps 55,000 doggos (0.55%) with their humans. Great for those families—not so much for our privacy.