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 Super Bowl commercial to introduce Search Party, an AI-powered feature that uses Ring camera footage to help find lost dogs, he hoped Americans would love it. Instead, the television ad set off a storm.

In fact, practically from the moment 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 sat down with TechCrunch a few days ago to make his case again, and while he was candid and clearly eager to reframe the narrative, some of his answers may well raise new questions among those already uncomfortable with the growth of domestic surveillance.

The feature at the center of the controversy is pretty mundane on the surface, and something we covered in a simple way when it was first released. A dog disappears; Ring alerts owners of nearby cameras to ask if the animal appears in their images; Users can respond or ignore the request entirely and remain invisible to everyone involved. Siminoff leaned heavily on this throughout our conversation: the idea that doing nothing counts as opting out, that no one is conscripted for anything.

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

What he believes really sparked the reaction was the image in the Super Bowl ad: a map showing blue circles pulsing from house to house as cameras flashed across a neighborhood grid. “I would change that,” he said. “It wasn’t our job to try to pressure anyone to try to get any answers.”

But Ring chose a difficult time to make his case. Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie, had disappeared from her Tucson home in late January. Footage from a Google Nest camera on the property, which captured a masked figure trying to cover the lens with foliage, spread across the Internet, placing home surveillance cameras squarely at the center of a national discussion about security, privacy and who can monitor whom.

Siminoff leaned toward the Guthrie case rather than away from it. in a separate interview With Fortune, he argued that it was an argument for putting more cameras in more homes. “I think if they had more (footage from Guthrie’s house), if there were more cameras in the house, I think we could have solved” the case, he said. He noted that Ring’s own network had found images of a suspicious vehicle two and a half miles from Guthrie’s property.

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

Either way, the discomfort with Search Party isn’t simply due to those blue concentric circles in the ad. The feature joins two others: Fire Watch, which generates maps of fires in the neighborhood, and Community Requests, which allows local authorities to ask Ring users in a given area if they have relevant images of an incident.

Ring relaunched Community Requests in September through a partnership with Axon, the company that makes body cameras and Tasers for police, and operates the evidence management platform Evidence.com. (Axon and Ring announced the partnership in April of last year, shortly after Siminoff rejoined the company after walking away in 2023.)

An older version of that. association involved Flock Safety, which operates AI-powered license plate readers. Ring ended that agreement Several days after the Super Bowl ad aired, Siminoff cited the “workload” it would create when speaking to us.

When asked directly, Siminoff declined to address whether Flock’s reported data sharing with U.S. Customs and Border Protection also played a role. (Dozens of cities across the United States have cut ties with Flock over exactly those concerns.) Still, the timing of Ring’s decision was notable. While Siminoff believes some customers are misinterpreting its products, he knows Ring can’t afford to ignore their anxieties, especially right now.

None of this happens in isolation. Just a few days ago, NPR reported on his own research compiled from dozens of accounts from people who found themselves caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding surveillance apparatus, including American citizens without any immigration status issues. oh

One woman, a constitutional observer following an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January, described a masked federal agent leaning out her window, photographing her and then shouting her name and address. “His message was not subtle,” he told NPR. “In fact, they were saying, ‘We see you. “We can contact you whenever we want.”

Siminoff seems to deeply understand that his answers about Ring’s own data practices take on additional weight as a result. When we spoke, he pointed to end-to-end encryption as Ring’s strongest privacy protection and confirmed that when it’s enabled, not even Ring employees can see the footage, as decryption requires a passphrase linked to the user’s own device. He described this as an industry first for residential camera companies.

The issue of facial recognition is where things get more tangled. Ring launched 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, delivery people, neighbors) so that, instead of a generic motion alert, Ring owners receive a notification that says “Mom at the front door.” Siminoff described the feature enthusiastically during our conversation, saying that he gets alerts, for example, when his teenager pulls into the driveway.

He compared it to the facial recognition that is now routine at TSA checkpoints; the implication is that the public has already made peace with this sort of thing. When asked about consent for people who appear on a Ring camera but never agreed to be listed, he said simply that Ring complies with applicable local and state laws.

He was also careful when asked if Amazon relies on Ring’s facial recognition data. “Amazon doesn’t access that data,” he said, later adding, “In the future, if we could see a feature where the customer wanted to opt in to do something with it, maybe we could see that happen.”

Additionally, it offered to say that end-to-end encryption is an optional feature – users must enable it manually in the Control Center of the Ring app. But according to Ring itself supporting documentationThe sacrifice to allow it is high. The full list of features disabled by end-to-end encryption includes event schedules, rich notifications, quick replies, Ring.com video access, shared user access, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, pre-roll, snapshot capture, aerial view, people 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 is at your door and true privacy from Ring itself) are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other but not both.

As for whether Ring users should worry about their footage ending up in front of a federal immigration agency, Siminoff said no (community requests are made only through local law enforcement channels) and pointed to Ring’s transparency report on government subpoenas. He did not refer to what happens when that boundary becomes porous.

Unsurprisingly, Siminoff is moving toward something bigger than doorbell cameras. Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field and is now quietly moving into enterprise security with a new line of “elite” cameras and a security trailer product. He said small businesses have already been incorporating Ring into their spaces, whether Ring markets to them or not. He’s also open to outdoor drones – “if we could get the cost to a place where it made sense” – and to license plate detection, which Ring’s now-former partner Flock Safety has turned into its core business, he declined to say never. (Ring is “definitely not” working on it today, he said when asked if it’s something Ring might explore. After a moment, he added that “it’s very hard to say we’ll never do something in the future.”)

Siminoff frames all of this through a belief he says he’s had since the company’s inception: that each home is a node controlled by its owner, and that residents should be able to choose whether they want to engage in neighborhood-level cooperation when something happens.

Unfortunately, at a time when an NPR investigation has documented federal agents photographing and identifying civilians doing nothing more than observing arrests, and when a kidnapping case has become a national conversation topic about cameras and privacy, the question is not just whether Ring’s engagement framework is well designed. It’s about whether what Ring is building — including a network of tens of millions of cameras, AI-powered search, and facial recognition — can remain as benign as Siminoff might pretend, regardless of who is in power, what partnerships are formed, and how the data flows.