Ring’s Jimmy Siminoff has been trying to allay privacy concerns since the Super Bowl, but his answers may not help

When Ring founder and CEO Jimmy 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 help find lost dogs — he expected Americans to love it. Instead, the TV ad sparked a firestorm.

In fact, 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, demonstrating that his critics fundamentally misunderstand what Ring is building. He sat down with TechCrunch a few days ago to lay out his case again, and while he was frank and clearly eager to reframe the narrative, some of his answers may raise new questions among those who already feel uneasy about the growth of home surveillance.

The feature at the center of the controversy is somewhat mundane on the surface, something we’ve covered in a file Clear method When it was first released. A dog disappears; The ring alerts nearby camera owners to ask if the animal will appear in their footage; Users can respond to the request or ignore it entirely and remain invisible to everyone involved. Semenov leaned heavily on this throughout our conversation—the idea that doing nothing is opting out, not enlisting anyone in anything.

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

What is believed to have actually led to the backlash was the visual on the Super Bowl website: a map showing blue circles pulsing outward from house by house as cameras rolled across the neighborhood grid. “I’ll change that,” he said. “It wasn’t our job to try and poke anyone to try to get some response.”

But Ring chose a difficult moment to make his case. Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie, disappeared from her Tucson home on January 31, and it was later confirmed that blood stains were found in the home. Footage from a Google Nest camera on the property, which captured a masked person trying to suffocate the lens with leaves, has spread across the Internet and put home security cameras squarely at the center of a national debate over safety, privacy, and who can monitor whom.

Semenov leaned into Guthrie’s cause rather than turning away from it. In a Separate interview With Fortune, he asserted that it was practically an argument for putting more cameras on more homes. “I think if they had had more (footage from Guthrie’s home), if there had been more cameras in the house, I think we might have been able to solve” the case, he said. He noted that Ring’s private network had uncovered footage of a suspicious vehicle two and a half miles from Guthrie’s property.

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

Either way, the annoyance with Search Party isn’t just about those blue concentric circles in the ad. The feature exists alongside two other features — Fire Watch, which relies on crowdsourcing to map neighborhood fires, and Community Requests, which allows local law enforcement to ask Ring users in a specific area if they have relevant footage from an incident. Ring relaunched community requests in September through a partnership with Axon, a company that makes police cameras and Tasers, and operates the evidence management platform Evidence.com. (Axon and Ring announced the partnership in April of last year, shortly after Siminoff’s announcement He returned to the company After stepping down in 2023.)

An earlier version of that partnership Flock Safety, which operates AI-powered license plate readers, is participating. bell He ended that partnership Several days after the Super Bowl ad aired, noting the “workload” it would create and citing mutual concerns.

When asked directly, Semenov declined to address whether the data exchange Fluke reported with U.S. Customs and Border Protection played a role. (Dozens of towns across the United States have cut ties with Fluke over precisely these concerns.) But the timing of Ring’s decision was notable. Even if Siminoff believes customers are misreading his products, he clearly understands that Ring cannot ignore their concerns, especially right now.

None of this happens in isolation. Just days ago, NPR reported on Private investigation It was compiled from dozens of accounts from people who found themselves caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding surveillance apparatus, including U.S. citizens with no immigration status issues at all. One woman, a constitutional monitor tracking an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January, described a masked federal agent leaning out a window and photographing her, then calling out her name and home address. “Their message was not subtle,” she told NPR. “They were actually saying, ‘We see you. We can reach you whenever we want to.'”

Siminoff seems to deeply understand that his answers about Ring’s data practices carry extra weight as a result. When we spoke, he pointed to end-to-end encryption as Ring’s strongest privacy protection and emphasized that when enabled, not even Ring employees can 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 a little more tangled. Ring rolled out 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 drivers, neighbors — so that instead of a generic motion alert you get a notification that reads “Mom at the front door.” Siminoff enthusiastically described the feature during our conversation, saying he gets alerts, for example, when his teenage son stops in the driveway. He compared it to the facial recognition feature that’s now routine at TSA checkpoints — meaning the public has already come to terms with this kind of thing. When asked about consent for people who appear on a Ring camera but never agreed to be indexed, he simply said that Ring adheres to applicable local and state laws.

He was also cautious when asked if Amazon was relying on Ring’s facial recognition data. “Amazon doesn’t have access to that data,” he said, then added, “If, in the future, a customer wants to opt in to do something with that data, maybe you could see that happen.”

He also volunteered that end-to-end encryption is an opt-in feature: users must manually enable it in the Control Center in the Ring app. But according to the ring Support documentsthe trade-off for enabling it is steep. The full list of features disabled by end-to-end encryption includes event timelines, rich notifications, quick replies, access to video on Ring.com, shared user access, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, pre-announcement, snapshot capture, bird’s eye view, people detection, AI video descriptions, video preview alerts, and a virtual security guard – and familiar faces, which require processing in the cloud. In other words, the two things that Ring actively touts as groundbreaking capabilities — knowing who’s 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 mug shots ending up in front of the federal immigration agency, Semenov said no — community requests are only run through local law enforcement channels — and pointed to Ring’s own transparency report on government subpoenas. He did not address what happens when those boundaries prove porous.

It’s no surprise that Siminoff is moving toward 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 pulled Ring into their spaces, whether Ring markets it to them or not. He’s also open to third-party drones — “if we can get the cost to a place where it makes sense” — and as for license plate detection, which former Ring partner Flock Safety has made its core business, he declined to say never. (When asked directly if this was something Ring might explore, he said Ring was “definitely not” working on it today but then added: “It’s very difficult to say we’ll never do something in the future.”)

He frames all of this within a belief he says he’s had since the company’s inception, which is that every home is a node controlled by its owner, and residents should be able to choose whether to participate in neighborhood-level collaboration when something happens.

Unfortunately, at a time when an NPR investigation documented federal agents photographing and identifying civilians who did nothing more than monitor arrests, and as the kidnapping issue has become a national point of discussion about both cameras and privacy, the question isn’t just whether Ring’s subscription 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 intend it to be, regardless of who’s in power, what partnerships are struck, and how the data flows.