Rings Jamie Siminoff is still trying to calm privacy fears, but his answers may not help | TechCrunch

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 help find lost dogs, he expected Americans to love it. Instead, the TV spot set off a firestorm.

Practically since the moment the ad 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 eager to re-frame the narrative, some of his answers may raise fresh questions among those already uneasy about the growth of home surveillance.

The feature at the center of the controversy is fairly mundane on the surface: A dog goes missing, Ring alerts nearby Ring owners to ask whether the animal shows up in their footage, and users can respond or ignore the request entirely to stay uninvolved. Siminoff leaned heavily on this throughout our conversation — the idea that doing nothing counts as opting out, and no one is conscripted into participating.

“It is 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 prompted the backlash was the visual in the Super Bowl spot: a map showing blue circles pulsing outward from house after house as cameras switched on across a neighborhood grid. “I would change that,” he said. “It wasn’t our job to try to poke anyone to try and get some response.”

Ring also picked a rocky moment to make its case. Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC show Today anchor Savannah Guthrie, had vanished from her Tucson home in late January. Footage from a Google Nest camera at the property showing a masked figure trying to smother the lens with foliage soon swept across the internet. Suddenly, home surveillance camera makers found themselves squarely into the center of a national argument about safety, privacy, and who gets to watch whom.

Siminoff leaned into the Guthrie case. In a separate interview with Fortune, he contended it was an argument for putting more cameras on more houses. “I do believe if they had more [footage from Guthrie’s home], if there was more cameras on the house, I think we might have solved [the case],” he said. Ring’s own network, he noted, had turned up footage of a suspicious vehicle two-and-a-half miles from the Guthrie property.

Whether you find that heartening or disturbing depends on your point of view. Siminoff clearly believes video surveillance is a social good, but some might hear those statements and see a company founder using a kidnapping to sell more of his products.

Either way, the discomfort with Search Party isn’t simply about those blue concentric circles in the ad. The feature sits alongside two others: Fire Watch, which crowdsources neighborhood fire mapping, and Community Requests, which allows local law enforcement to ask Ring users in a given area whether they have relevant footage from an incident.

Ring relaunched Community Requests in September through a partnership with Axon, which makes police body 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 rejoined the company after stepping away in 2023.

A previous version of that partnership involved Flock Safety, which operates AI-powered license plate readers. Ring ended that arrangement several days after the Super Bowl ad aired, with Siminoff citing the “workload” it would create when he talked with us.

Siminoff declined to address whether reports of Flock sharing data with U.S. Customs and Border Protection also played a role. Dozens of towns across the U.S. have cut ties with Flock over exactly those concerns. Still, the timing of Ring’s decision was notable. While Siminoff believes some customers are misreading his products, he knows Ring can’t afford to dismiss their anxieties, particularly right now.

None of this is happening in isolation. Just days ago, NPR published an investigation compiled from dozens of accounts from people who found themselves caught 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 observer trailing an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January, described a masked federal agent leaning out the window, photographing her, and then calling out her name and home address. “Their message was not subtle,” she told NPR. “They were, in effect, saying, we see you. We can get to you whenever we want to.”

Siminoff seems to understand that his answers about Ring’s data practices take on added weight as a result. When we talked, 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 view the footage, as decryption requires a passphrase tied to the user’s own device. He described this as an industry first for residential camera companies.

The matter of facial recognition is where things get more tangled. Two months before the Super Bowl ad, Ring rolled out a feature called Familiar Faces that lets users catalog up to 50 frequent visitors — family members, delivery drivers, or neighbors — so that the camera sends a notification identifying the person at the door, say, “Mom at Front Door.” Siminoff described the feature enthusiastically during our conversation, saying that he gets alerts, for example, when his teenage son pulls into the driveway.

He compared it to the facial recognition now routine at TSA checkpoints – the implication being that the public has already made its peace with this kind of thing. When asked about consent from people who appear on a Ring camera but never agreed to be catalogued, he said simply that Ring adheres to applicable local and state laws.

Siminoff was also careful when asked whether Amazon draws on Ring’s facial recognition data. “Amazon does not access that data,” he said, then he added: “In the future, if we could see a feature where the customer wanted to opt in to do something with that, maybe you could see that happening.”

He further volunteered that end-to-end encryption is an opt-in feature: Users have to manually enable it in the Ring app’s Control Center. But according to Ring’s own support documentation, the tradeoff for enabling it 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 capture, bird’s eye view, person detection, AI video descriptions, video preview alerts, virtual security guard, and Familiar Faces, which requires processing in the cloud.

In other words, the two things Ring is actively promoting as flagship capabilities — AI-powered recognition of who’s at your door, and true privacy from Ring itself — are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other, not both.

As for whether Ring users should worry about their footage ending up in front of a federal immigration agency, Siminoff said no, explaining that community requests run only through local law enforcement channels. He pointed to Ring’s transparency report on government subpoenas, but didn’t say what happens when that boundary proves porous.

Unsurprisingly, Siminoff is building toward something that reaches farther than doorbell cameras. Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field, and is now quietly dipping a toe into enterprise security with a new “elite” camera line and a security trailer product.

He said that small businesses have been pulling the company’s cameras into their spaces, whether Ring markets to them or not. He’s also open to outdoor drones: “If we could get the cost in a place where it made sense.”

On the topic of license plate detection, which Flock Safety has made its core business, he declined to say never. Ring is “definitely not” working on it today, he said, although he didn’t say the company wouldn’t explore that option. “It’s very hard to say we’re never going to do something in the future.”

Siminoff frames all of it through a belief that he says he has held from Ring’s beginning: Each home is a node controlled by its owner, and residents should be able to choose whether to participate in neighborhood-level cooperation when something happens.

But we live in a time when federal agents are photographing and identifying civilians observing arrests, and a kidnapping case has become a national talking point about privacy. The question isn’t just about whether Ring’s opt-in framework is designed well; it’s whether what Ring is building can remain as benign as Siminoff may intend it.