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

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 to love it. Instead, the TV spot set off a firestorm.

In fact, practically from the moment it went on the air in February, Siminoff has been making the rounds in the pages of CNN, NBC and the New York Times, explaining that his critics fundamentally misunderstand what Ring is up to. He sat down with TechCrunch a few days ago to restate his claim, and while he’s candid and eager to reinterpret the narrative, some of his answers may raise fresh questions among those already worried about the rise of surveillance in the home.

The feature at the heart of the controversy is fairly mundane on the surface, and something we cover in something straight road when it was first released. A dog goes missing; The call alerts nearby camera owners to ask if the animal appears in their footage; users can respond to the request or reject it completely and remain invisible to everyone involved. Siminoff relied heavily on this throughout our conversation—the idea that doing nothing counts as giving up, that no one is involved in anything.

“It’s no different than finding a dog in your yard, looking at the collar and calling the number,” he said.

What caused the backlash, he said, was a visual in the Super Bowl spot: a map showing blue circles going from house to house as cameras panned out across the neighborhood grid. “I would change that,” he said. “It wasn’t our job to test somebody and try to get an answer.”

But Ring chose a difficult moment to make his case. Nancy Guthrie — the 84-year-old mother of Today Show host Savannah Guthrie — disappeared from her Tucson home on Jan. 31, later confirmed to have blood stains on the residence. Footage of a masked figure trying to smother the lens with leaves from a Google Nest camera at a property has swept the internet and put home surveillance cameras at the center of a national debate over security, privacy and who can watch whom.

Instead of moving away from it, Siminoff gravitated toward Guthrie’s work. a separate interview With Fortune, he argued that this is practically an argument for putting more cameras in more homes. “I believe if there were more of them (the footage from Guthrie’s home), if there were more cameras in the house, I think we could have solved the case,” he said. The ring’s own network, he noted, turned up footage of a suspicious vehicle two and a half miles from the Guthrie property.

Whether you find this heartening or disturbing depends on your point of view. Siminoff clearly believes that video is a poor social good, but some might look at the same statements and see a company founder using impersonation to get more of their product into the hands of consumers.

Either way, the concern with Search Party isn’t just about the blue concentric circles in the ad. The feature sits alongside two others — Fire Watch, which compiles a neighborhood fire map, and Community Surveys, which allows local law enforcement to ask Ring users in a given area if they have relevant footage of an incident. Ring relaunched Community Requests in September through a partnership with Axon, which makes police body cameras and tasers and operates the Evidence.com evidence management platform. (Axon and Ring announced the partnership last April shortly after Siminoff rejoined the company After moving away in 2023.)

An earlier version of this partnership Flock Safety, which operates AI-powered license plate readers, was involved. Ring ended the partnership A few days after the Super Bowl ad aired, it cited mutual concerns, citing the “workload” it would create.

Asked directly, Siminoff declined to discuss whether Flock’s information sharing with U.S. Customs and Border Protection played a role. (Dozens of cities in the US have cut ties with Flock over these very concerns.) But the timing of Ring’s decision was remarkable. Even if Siminoff believes customers are misreading his products, he clearly understands that Ring can’t address their concerns, especially now.

None of this happens on its own. NPR reported on this a few days ago own research It was compiled from dozens of accounts from people caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding surveillance apparatus, including U.S. citizens with no immigration status issues. A constitutional watcher following an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January described a masked federal agent leaning out the window, taking her picture and then calling out her name and home address. “Their message was not subtle,” he told NPR. “They basically said we see you. We can come to you whenever we want.”

Siminoff is keenly aware that Ring’s answers about his data experiences ultimately carry additional weight. When we spoke, he cited end-to-end encryption as Ring’s strongest privacy protection, confirming that when it’s enabled, even Ring employees can’t view footage, as decryption requires a password tied to the user’s own device. He described it as an industry for live cam companies.

The question of facial recognition 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 drivers, neighbors — so that instead of a generic movement alert, you get a notification that says “Mom at the door.” Siminoff enthusiastically described the feature during our conversation, saying, for example, that he gets a warning when his teenage son pulls into the driveway. He compared it to the facial recognition system that’s common at TSA checkpoints — the result of which is that the public has come to terms with such things. When asked about the consent of people who appeared on Ring’s camera but never agreed to be cataloged, he said only that Ring abides by 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 added: “If a customer wanted to do something with it in the future, maybe you could see that happen.”

He further volunteered that end-to-end encryption is an opt-in feature: users must manually enable it in the Ring app’s Control Center. But according to Ring himself supporting documentsthe exchange to provide it is sharp. Full list of features enabled with end-to-end encryption includes event graphs, rich notifications, quick replies, video access on Ring.com, shared user access, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, advance recording, snapshot capture, bird’s eye view, human detection, AI video descriptions, video viewing alerts, virtual security requests. the cloud In other words, the two things that Ring actively promotes as flagship capabilities — AI recognition of 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 are concerned that their footage will end up in front of federal immigration agencies, Siminoff said no — community appeals are made only through local law enforcement channels — and pointed to Ring’s transparency report on government subpoenas. He didn’t pick up on what happened when the border proved porous.

Not surprisingly, Siminoff is building 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 “elite” camera line and security trailer product. He acknowledged that small businesses are attracting Ring to their locations, whether it’s Ring markets or not. He’s also open to outdoor drones — “if we could get the price where it makes sense” — and license plate detection, which Ring now makes into a core business of former partner Flock Safety, he declined to say. (When asked directly if there was anything Ring could explore, he said Ring would “definitely not work” today, but then added, “It’s very hard to say we’ll never do something in the future.”)

He expresses his belief that this is what the company has maintained since its inception, that each home is a node controlled by its owner, and that residents can choose whether or not 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 were doing nothing more than observing arrests, and when the kidnapping case has become a national talking point about both cameras and privacy, the question is not just whether Ring’s selection framework was well-designed. Can what Ring has built — including a network of tens of millions of cameras, AI-powered search and facial recognition — remain as benign as Siminoff thinks, no matter who’s in power, what partnerships happen, or how data flows?