The nonprofit Watch Duty is partnering with Ring, the Amazon-owned maker of doorbell cameras, to help users share videos of nearby wildfires on Watch Duty’s wildfire tracking app.
The result is Fire Watch, a new feature being added to Ring’s Neighbors app, the stand-alone service that lets users see activity from nearby Ring cameras. If there is a fire in the area, users will be notified and can go into an emergency mode that lets them share videos from their Ring cameras to the feed about that specific fire on Watch Duty’s platform.
It’s not a posting free-for-all; Watch Duty says it will choose which Ring videos to show in Fire Watch, based on relevance. Ring says Fire Watch will roll out to Neighborhood app users this spring.
The announcement comes at the one year anniversary of the 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires in Los Angeles, which leveled entire neighborhoods, caused billions of dollars in damage, killed 30 people in the flames, and led to more than 400 deaths in total.
Watch Duty, which lets users track wildfires and receive minute-by-minute updates about a blaze’s path and perimeter, became something of a lifeline for desperate LA residents looking for timely fire information. The mobile app saw 2.5 million new downloads during the LA fires and was widely hailed as a necessary resource.
One newfound Watch Duty user was Jamie Siminoff, the founder of Ring. While not at Ring at the time, he later rejoined the company after the Palisades fire burned his garage and parts of the back of his house. The experience of searching for information about where the fire was made him think that the Ring cameras all around him should have helped.
“While I’m in it, I thought, why are we not doing this? And why are we not doing that?” Siminoff says. “A big part of why I wanted to come back was to do things like this with the Ring network and with our Ring customers.”
Fire Watch gets its real-time fire alerts from Watch Duty, and the feature notifies Neighbors users if a fire is nearby. There is also a feature to accept “voluntary community contributions” that lets Ring users opt in to sharing shots from their smart-home cameras with Watch Duty.
“When you go into this mode, you’ll get an alert as a Ring customer saying there’s a massive fire in your area, basically, and would you like to assist Watch Duty with this?” Siminoff says. “You’re basically opening up your camera for the next 24 hours to donate your data.”
This is not the first third-party service Watch Duty has partnered with. It currently pulls map and fire perimeter information from official emergency services, then collates and regularly updates the information into an easily digestible feed on its app. Alert Wildfire, a service that powers a network of video cameras to spot fires, allows its videos to be included in Watch Duty’s reported feeds about individual fires. Watch Duty volunteers and users can also reach out individually to share their videos or photos.
The new partnership automates crowdsourcing of user video. “Their system will get a ping and say, hey, there’s a fire within a mile of your property, you should know about it,” says John Mills, the CEO of Watch Duty. Users then get the option to share a live feed of the view from their front porch with the world.
“Front-row seats—street-level view to what’s actually happening—is a crazy concept,” Mills says. “We’ve seen this before. People will release flooding imagery or fire imagery and stuff from Ring cameras and put it out on Twitter.”
According to Siminoff, more than 10,000 Ring cameras were in the area of the Palisades fires. If they had been utilized to help residents and first responders have more views of where the fires were, Siminoff says, the extra info could have been a big help.
“I do think this will be something that will help in these situations in the future to just give them more real-time data of where the fire actually is,” Siminoff says.
When Ring reached out to Watch Duty, Mills says he talked with Siminoff, who shared his experience in the Palisades fire. Working together felt like a natural fit.
“He’s like, I want to get this fucking deal done right now,” Mills says, colorfully paraphrasing the conversation. “And then just gave us a fucking huge check and was like, we’re going to build this, get it out fucking early next year. I’m like, alright.”
Ring’s data-sharing practices, and the Neighbors app in particular, have drawn significant controversy. Ring has touched off privacy concerns by working with the police to share user videos, getting sued for not protecting private videos, and becoming the most high-profile AI surveillance device out there. (WIRED generally does not recommend Ring cameras, due to our concerns about how the company has handled these privacy issues over the years.)
“We’re trying to make things better, not worse, but we’re going to keep learning,” Siminoff says. “We’re going to iterate on this continually until we help collectively, with other companies and other technologies, to minimize the impact of these natural disasters that seem to be getting worse and more frequent.”
Mills says Ring’s efforts in the wildfire space squares with Watch Duty’s ethos. The service is primarily run by hundreds of volunteers who track wildfire information from a variety of sources. Ring videos are yet another potentially useful data stream.
“If it’s one person’s house burning down, we’re not going to show that to the world,” Mills says. “It’s not very useful. But if we see a whole entire block going up in fire, we’re going to publish that. If we watch ember brands flying down the street, we want to show that to civilians and especially first responders.”
Another feature Fire Watch offers is AI-powered smoke and fire detection for Ring Home subscribers. While Ring and Watch Duty both use AI in some capacity, Mills says this is different from the fire detection system Watch Duty uses, which is always vetted by a human. (Likely one of Watch Duty’s many volunteers.)
“There is no auto-approval anywhere on Watch Duty,” Mills says. “There are zero places where a human is not involved. None.”
Amazon has exhibited a tendency to gobble up like-minded services in its orbit. I ask Mills if there is any chance Watch Duty is up for grabs if the tech giant makes a good enough offer. He scoffs at the idea.
“There isn’t enough money,” Mills says. “We’re not for sale. It’s never going to happen, as long as I’m here. We need better role models in this world and I’d rather die than sell it.”
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