Ring’s Jamie Siminoff has been trying to calm privacy fears since the Super Bowl, but his answers may not help

When Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff decided to use the company’s first-ever Super Bowl commercial to introduce Search Party — an AI-powered feature that uses Ring camera footage to find lost dogs — he expected Americans to love it. Instead, the TV spot started a firestorm.

In fact, since it aired in February, Siminoff has been making the rounds on CNN, NBC and in the pages of the New York Times, explaining that his critics fundamentally misunderstand what Ring is building. He spoke to TechCrunch a few days ago to argue his case again, and while he was candid and clearly eager to reframe the story, some of his answers could very well raise new questions among those already uneasy about the growth of home surveillance.

The feature at the center of the controversy is fairly mundane at first glance, and something we discussed in a straightforward manner when it was first released. A dog goes missing; Ring warns camera owners in the area to ask if the animal appears in their images; users can answer the request completely or ignore it and remain invisible to everyone involved. Siminoff leaned heavily on this during our conversation: the idea that doing nothing counts as opting out, that no one gets called out for anything.

“It’s no different than finding a dog in your backyard, looking at the collar and deciding whether or not to call the number,” he said.

What he believes actually caused the backlash was the image in the Super Bowl spot: a map showing blue circles pulsing outward from house after house as cameras turn on in a neighborhood grid. “I would change that,” he said. “It wasn’t our job to poke anyone to get a response.”

But Ring chose a difficult moment to strengthen his position. Nancy Guthrie – the 84-year-old mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie – had disappeared from her Tucson home on January 31, with bloodstains later confirmed to be hers found in the home. Footage from a Google Nest camera in the property, which captured a masked figure trying to smother the lens with leaves, had swept the internet and put home surveillance cameras squarely at the center of a national discussion about security, privacy and who can see who.

Siminoff leaned into the Guthrie case rather than away from it. In one separate interview with Fortune, he argued that there was a practical argument for putting more cameras on more houses. “I really believe they had more [footage from Guthrie’s home]“If there had been more cameras in the house, I think we might have solved the case,” he said. Ring’s own network, he noted, had found images of a suspicious vehicle two and a half miles away from the Guthrie estate.

Whether you find that encouraging or disturbing depends on your point of view. Siminoff clearly believes that video is an unqualified social good, but some might look at the same statements and see a company founder using kidnapping to get more of his products into the hands of consumers.

Anyway, the discomfort with Search Party isn’t just about those blue concentric circles in the ad. This feature sits alongside two other features: Fire Watch, which collects crowdsourced fire maps in the area, and Community Requests, which allows local law enforcement to ask Ring users in a specific area if they have relevant footage of an incident. Ring relaunched Community Requests in September through a partnership with Axon, the company that makes police cameras and tasers and operates the evidence management platform Evidence.com. (Axon and Ring announced the partnership last April, shortly after Siminoff rejoined the company after stepping down in 2023.)

An earlier version of that partnership involved Flock Safety, which operates AI-powered license plate readers. Ring ended that partnership just days after the Super Bowl ad aired, citing the “workload” it would cause and pointing to mutual concerns.

When asked directly, Siminoff declined to comment on whether Flock’s reported data sharing with U.S. Customs and Border Protection played a role. (Dozens of U.S. cities have cut ties with Flock precisely because of these concerns.) But the timing of Ring’s decision was remarkable. Even if Siminoff believes customers are misinterpreting its products, he clearly understands that Ring can’t afford to address their concerns, especially now.

None of this happens in isolation. A few days ago, NPR reported on this own research compiled from dozens of accounts of people caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding surveillance apparatus, including American citizens who had no immigration status problems at all. One woman, a constitutional observer who chased an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January, described a masked federal agent leaning out the window, photographing her and then shouting her name and home address. “Their message was not subtle,” she told NPR. “They basically said, we’ll see you. We can come to you whenever we want.”

Siminoff seems to deeply understand that this gives his answers about Ring’s own data practices extra weight. During our conversation, he pointed to end-to-end encryption as Ring’s strongest privacy protection and confirmed that when it’s enabled, even Ring employees can’t view the footage because decryption requires a passphrase tied to the user’s own device. He described this as an industry first for residential camera companies.

The facial recognition question is where things get more complicated. Ring introduced a feature called Familiar Faces in December, two months before the Super Bowl ad aired. It allows users to catalog up to 50 frequent visitors – family members, delivery people, neighbors – so that instead of a generic motion alert, you get a notification that says “Mother at the front door.” Siminoff enthusiastically described the feature during our conversation, saying that, for example, he gets alerts when his teenage son pulls into the driveway. He compared it to the facial recognition that is now routine at TSA checkpoints – implying that the public has already made peace with this sort of thing. When asked about the consent of people who appear on a Ring camera but never agreed to be included in the catalog, he simply said that Ring complies with applicable local and state laws.

He was also cautious when asked whether Amazon uses Ring’s facial recognition data. “Amazon doesn’t have access to that data,” he said, then continued: “If a customer wanted to sign up to do something with that in the future, you might see that happen.”

He went on to say that end-to-end encryption is an opt-in feature: users must manually enable it in the Ring app’s Control Center. But in Ring’s own opinion supporting documentationthe trade-off for making this possible is steep. The full list of features disabled by end-to-end encryption includes event timelines, rich notifications, quick replies, video access on Ring.com, shared user access, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, pre-roll, snapshot recording, bird’s-eye view, person detection, AI video descriptions, video preview alerts, virtual security guard – and familiar faces, which require cloud processing. In other words, the two things Ring is actively promoting as flagship capabilities – AI-powered recognition of who’s at the door and true privacy from Ring itself – are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other, but not both.

When asked whether Ring users should worry about their images ending up before a federal immigration agency, Siminoff said no — community requests only go through local law enforcement channels — and pointed to Ring’s transparency report on government subpoenas. He did not elaborate on what happens if that border turns out to be porous.

It’s not surprising that Siminoff is building something bigger than doorbell cameras. Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field and is now quietly diving into enterprise security with a new “elite” camera line and a security trailer product. He acknowledged that small businesses have already attracted Ring to their market, whether Ring markets to them or not. He is also open to outdoor drones – “if we could get the cost to where it makes sense” – and to license plate detection, which Ring’s now former partner Flock Safety has made its core business, he declined to say never. (When asked directly whether it’s something Ring might explore, he said Ring is “absolutely not” working on it today, but added, “It’s very difficult to say we’ll never do anything in the future.”)

He frames all of this within the belief he says he has held from the company’s inception, that every home is a hub controlled by its owner, and that residents should be able to choose whether they want to participate in community collaboration when something happens.

Unfortunately, at a time when an NPR investigation has documented federal agents photographing and identifying citizens doing nothing more than observing arrests, and a kidnapping case has become a national talking point about both cameras and privacy, the question isn’t just about whether Ring’s opt-in framework is well designed. At issue is whether what Ring is building — including a network of tens of millions of cameras, AI-driven search and facial recognition — can remain as benign as Siminoff may have intended, regardless of who is in power, what partnerships are formed and how the data flows.