Ring and Watch Duty Launch Fire Watch: Crowdsourced Video Alerts for Wildfire Emergencies

Ring, Amazon’s home‑security camera maker, has added a new capability to its Neighbors app—Fire Watch—through a partnership with the wildfire‑tracking nonprofit Watch Duty. When a blaze is detected near a user’s property, Fire Watch notifies the Ring app, and the user can activate an emergency mode that invites the camera to stream footage to Watch Duty’s public feed. The collaboration leverages Watch Duty’s minute‑by‑minute fire perimeter data, which is already fed into its own mobile app. Now that information can trigger automated alerts to Ring customers who opt in. When the user selects the share option, their camera streams live video from the front of their property for up to 24 hours, providing street‑level, real‑time evidence of the fire. Fire Watch was announced in the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton fires that ravaged Los Angeles in 2025. Those incidents underscored the need for rapid, trustworthy information. Watch Duty’s app recorded 2.5 million new downloads during the LA crisis, while Ring’s owner, Jamie Siminoff, cited the personal loss of his own home to a wildfire as a catalyst for the partnership. Under the system, not all user footage is displayed. Watch Duty evaluates each video’s relevance—whether a fire is affecting a neighborhood or a large block—before publishing it to the feed. The service is designed to avoid showing footage that concerns a single residence, emphasizing collective safety. Ring’s previous dealings with law enforcement over user video have sparked privacy concerns. The company has faced lawsuits and criticism for its data handling. In response, Siminoff stated that “We’re trying to make things better, not worse, and we’ll iterate on this continually.” The Fire Watch feature also uses AI for smoke detection, but any automated alerts are reviewed by Watch Duty volunteers before being routed to emergency responders. The partnership represents an expansion of Watch Duty’s existing collaborations with other third‑party services. The nonprofit already pulls map and perimeter data from official agencies and allows volunteers to supply images and videos for its feeds. Fire Watch automates that crowdsourcing, providing a push‑based notification instead of the manual process of community outreach. John Mills, CEO of Watch Duty, highlighted the scale of the data source: “More than 10,000 Ring cameras were in the Palisades region, and the extra real‑time perspective could have saved lives.” He also noted that the partnership’s launch is expected in the spring of the target year. Despite the benefits, there remains tension between the value of open data for emergency response and Ring’s history of sharing private video with police. Siminoff affirmed that the aim is to “minimize the impact of natural disasters” while learning from past privacy issues. Watch Duty’s volunteers, who vet all footage before it reaches emergency services, emphasize that the system will only publish material that has a broader public safety impact. “If it’s one home burning, we don’t publish that,” Mills said. “But if an entire block is on fire or embers are traveling down the street, we want to show that to civilians and first responders.” In short, Ring’s Fire Watch integrates third‑party wildfire monitoring with consumer smart‑home cameras to create a scalable, crowd‑sourced feed that can inform both the public and emergency responders during evolving fire events. The initiative demonstrates how consumer technology and nonprofit data platforms can cooperate to address a growing public safety challenge while navigating the complexities of data privacy.