When Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff decided to use the company’s first Super Bowl ad to introduce Search Party, an AI-powered feature that uses Ring camera footage to help find lost dogs, he expected Americans would love it. Instead, the TV commercial created a storm.
In fact, from the moment it aired in February, Siminoff has been making the rounds of the pages of CNN, NBC, and the New York Times, explaining that his critics are fundamentally misunderstanding what Ring is building. He restated his claims a few days ago when he sat down with TechCrunch, and while he’s honest and eager to reframe the narrative, some of his answers may spark new questions among those already uneasy about the growth of home surveillance.
The feature at the center of the controversy was fairly ordinary on the surface, and was something we only briefly covered when it was first released. The dog is missing. Ring alerts nearby camera owners and asks them if an animal appears in their footage. Users can respond to requests entirely or ignore them, remaining invisible to everyone involved. Siminoff relied heavily on this throughout the conversation. The idea is that doing nothing is considered opt-out and no one will be drafted.
“It’s no different than finding a dog in the backyard, looking at its leash, and deciding whether or not to call,” he said.
It was the visuals from the Super Bowl that he believes actually sparked the backlash. It was a map that showed a blue circle pulsing outward from each house as the cameras turned on across the neighborhood grid. “I will change that,” he said. “It wasn’t our job to stab someone and try to get a reaction.”
But Ring chose a difficult moment to solve the case. Nancy Guthrie, 84, the mother of Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie, disappeared from her Tucson home on January 31, and blood stains found there were later identified as hers. Footage from the building’s Google Nest camera, which captured a person wearing a mask to block the lens with leaves, swept the Internet and put home surveillance cameras at the center of a national debate about safety, privacy and who watches who.
Rather than moving away from the Guthrie case, Siminoff leaned toward it. In a separate interview with Fortune, he argued that this was effectively an argument for installing more cameras in more homes. “I think if they had had more (footage from Guthrie’s home) and had had more cameras in the home, we would have solved the case,” he said. He pointed out that Ring’s own network found footage of a suspicious vehicle 2.5 miles from the Guthrie property.
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Whether you find it heartwarming or unsettling depends on your perspective. While Siminoff clearly believes that video does not qualify as a social good, some might look at the same statement and see the company’s founder using kidnapping to get more of his product into the hands of consumers.
Either way, my discomfort with the search party isn’t just due to the blue concentric circles in the ad. It comes with two features: Fire Watch, which crowdsources mapping of nearby fires, and Community Requests, which allows local law enforcement to ask Ring users in a specific area if they have footage related to an incident. Ring launched Community Requests back in September through a partnership with Axon, a company that manufactures police body cameras and Tasers and operates evidence management platform Evidence.com. (Axon and Ring announced their partnership last April, shortly after Siminoff rejoined the company after stepping down in 2023.)
Previous versions of that partnership included Flock Safety, which operates AI-based license plate readers. Ring ended the partnership a few days after the Super Bowl commercial aired, citing the “amount of work” it would cause and citing mutual concerns.
When asked directly, Siminoff declined to say whether data sharing with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as reported by Flock, played any role. (Dozens of cities across the U.S. have cut ties with the Flock over these very concerns.) But the timing of Ring’s decision is notable. Even if Siminoff thinks customers are misreading his product, he clearly understands that Ring can’t afford to dismiss its customers’ anxieties, especially right now.
None of this happens in isolation. Just a few days ago, NPR reported that it had conducted its own investigation, collecting dozens of accounts of people caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanded surveillance apparatus, including U.S. citizens with no immigration status issues whatsoever. A Constitutional Observer woman who was following an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January described seeing a masked federal agent lean out her window, take her picture, and then yell out her name and home address. “Their message was not subtle,” she told NPR. “They were effectively saying we see you. We can come to you whenever we want.”
Siminoff seems to have a deep understanding that his answers about Ring’s own data practices will carry greater weight as a result. When we spoke, he pointed out that end-to-end encryption is Ring’s strongest privacy protection, and confirmed that once encryption is enabled, not even Ring employees can view the footage because decryption requires a password linked to the user’s own device. He explained that this is an industry first for a residential camera company.
The facial recognition issue is where things get more complicated. Ring launched a feature called Familiar Faces in December, two months before the Super Bowl commercial aired. This allows users to segment up to 50 frequent visitors, such as family members, delivery people, neighbors, etc., so you’ll get a “Mom on the front door” notification instead of the typical motion notification. Siminoff enthusiastically described the feature during our conversation, saying it would, for example, trigger an alert when his teenage son pulls into the driveway. He compared it to facial recognition, which is now routinely used at TSA checkpoints. This means the public is already comfortable with this kind of thing. When asked about the consent of people who appear on Ring cameras but do not consent to being cataloged, he simply said that Ring complies with applicable local and state laws.
He was also cautious when asked if Amazon was using Ring’s facial recognition data. “Amazon doesn’t have access to that data,” he said, before adding, “If the customer chooses to do something with that data in the future, we’ll probably see that happen.”
He also volunteered that end-to-end encryption is an optional feature. Users must manually enable this in the Ring app’s Control Center. But according to Ring’s own support documentation, the price to enable it is steep. The full list of features disabled with end-to-end encryption includes event timeline, rich notifications, quick response, video access from Ring.com, shared user access, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, pre-roll, snapshot capture, bird’s eye view, people detection, AI video annotation, video preview alerts, virtual guards, and acquaintances that require processing in the cloud. That said, the two things Ring actively promotes as its flagship features – AI-based recognition of who’s at the door and Ring’s own true privacy protection – are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other, but not both.
As for whether Ring users should be worried about their videos being posted in front of federal immigration authorities, Siminoff said they don’t. Community requests are only carried out through local law enforcement channels, he pointed out Ring’s transparency report on government subpoenas. He did not address what happens when the boundary proves to be porous.
Naturally, Siminoff is moving toward something bigger than doorbell cameras. Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field and is now quietly entering enterprise security with a new line of “elite” cameras and security trailer products. He acknowledged that small businesses are already attracting Ring into their spaces, regardless of whether Ring markets them or not. He also said he’s open to outdoor drones “if we can get the money where it makes sense” and declined to say anything about license plate detection, which is now a core business of Ring’s former partner Flock Safety. (When asked directly if this was something Ring could explore, he said Ring was “definitely not” working on it currently, but added: “It’s very hard to say we won’t do anything in the future.”)
From the company’s early days, he has framed all of this around the belief that each house is a node managed by its owner, and that when something happens, residents should be able to choose whether or not to participate in neighborhood-level cooperation.
Alas, at a moment when an NPR investigation documents federal agents photographing and identifying civilians who did little more than observe arrests, and kidnappings have become a national talking point about cameras and privacy, the question is not limited to whether Ring’s selection framework was well designed. The question is whether what Ring is building, which includes a network of tens of millions of cameras, AI-based search and facial recognition, can remain as benign as Siminoff intended, regardless of who holds power, what partnerships are struck and how data flows.
