The Ring’s Jamie Siminoff has been trying to quell secret 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 commercial to launch Search Party — an AI-powered feature that uses Ring camera images to help find lost dogs — he expected Americans to love it. Instead, the TV spot set off a firestorm.

In fact, since it aired in February, Siminoff has been making the rounds on CNN, NBC, and the pages of the New York Times, explaining that his critics don’t quite understand what makes The Ring. He sat down with TechCrunch a few days ago to make his case again, and while he was candid and clearly willing to reframe the story, some of his answers may raise new questions among those already concerned about the rise of home surveillance.

The feature at the heart of the controversy is a common one, and something we talked about in a straightforward way when it was first released. The dog gets lost; Alerts to ring nearby camera owners to ask if an animal appears in their photos; users can respond or ignore the request completely and remain invisible to everyone involved. Siminoff leans heavily on this throughout our conversation – the idea that doing nothing is as important as getting out, that no one is signed up to do something.

“It’s no different if you find a dog in your yard, look at the collar and decide whether to call the number or not,” he said.

They believe it actually caused a visual reversal of the Super Bowl scene: a map showing blue circles going out from house to house as cameras flashed the area grid. “I can change that,” he said. “It was not our job to try to force anyone to try to find an answer.”

But Ring chose a difficult time to lay the case. Nancy Guthrie – the 84-year-old mother of the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie – disappeared from her Tucson home on January 31, it was confirmed that blood stains were found in her apartment. Footage taken from a Google Nest camera in the area, which captures a masked man trying to block the lens with leaves, has swept the Internet and put home surveillance cameras at the center of a national debate over security, privacy, and who gets to watch whom.

Siminoff leans toward Guthrie’s case rather than away from it. In a separate interview with Fortune, he argued that it was controversial to put more cameras in more houses. “I believe if they had more [footage from Guthrie’s home]if there were more cameras in the house, I think we would have solved it.” He said Ring’s own network showed a picture of a suspicious vehicle about two and a half miles from Guthrie’s property.

Whether you find that comforting or disturbing depends on your perspective. Siminoff clearly believes that the video is a social misnomer, but others may look at similar statements and see the founder of a company using abduction to get more of his products into the hands of consumers.

Either way, the discomfort with Search Party isn’t limited to those concentric blue circles in the ad. The feature sits alongside two others – Fire Watch, which includes a fire location map, and Community Requests, which allows local law enforcement to ask Ringi users in a given area if they have any footage related to an incident. Ring also launched Public Applications in September in partnership with Axon, a company that makes police body cameras and tasers, and uses evidence management platform Evidence.com. (Axon and Ring announced the partnership in April of last year, shortly after Siminoff rejoined the company after stepping down in 2023.)

A previous version of that partnership involved Flock Safety, which uses AI-powered license plate readers. Ring ended that relationship a few days after the Super Bowl ad aired, citing the “workload” it would create and citing similar concerns.

When asked directly, Siminoff declined to consider whether Flock’s data sharing with US Customs and Border Protection played a role. (Many cities across the US have cut ties with Flock because of those concerns.) But the timing of Ring’s decision was notable. Even if Siminoff believes that customers are misreading his products, he clearly understands that Ring cannot dismiss their concerns, especially right now.

None of this happens in isolation. A few days ago, NPR reported on its investigation that included dozens of accounts from people who found themselves caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding surveillance machine, including American citizens with no immigration status issues. One woman, a constitutional observer following an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January, described a masked agent leaning out the window, taking a picture of her, and yelling her name and home address. “Their message was not clear,” he told NPR. In fact, they were saying that we can see you, we can come whenever we want.

Siminoff seems keenly aware that his answers about Ring’s data practices carry more 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, even Ring employees can’t view the video, as decryption requires a passphrase tied to the user’s device. He described this as the first factory for residential camera companies.

The facial recognition question is where things are matched. 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 members, delivery drivers, neighbors — so that instead of the usual motion alert, you get a notification that reads “Mom at Front Door.” Siminoff explained this feature enthusiastically during our interview, saying that he gets alerts, for example, when his teenage son gets in the way. He compared it to the facial recognition process now at TSA checkpoints – meaning the public has made peace with this type of thing. When asked about consent from people who appeared on Ring’s camera but did not agree to be included in the catalog, he said only that Ring adheres to applicable local and state laws.

He was also cautious when asked if Amazon was pulling Ring’s facial recognition data. “Amazon doesn’t have access to that data,” he said, then continued: “If the customer, in the future, wants to go in and do something about that, maybe you can see that happen.”

He also volunteered that end-to-end encryption is an opt-in feature: users must enable it manually in the Ring app’s Control Center. But according to Ring’s support documentation, the tradeoff for enabling it is steep. The full list of features disabled by end-to-end encryption includes timed events, rich notifications, quick replies, video access to Ring.com, shared user access, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, advance scrolling, snapshot capture, bird’s eye view, human detection, AI video descriptions, video preview alerts, cloud guard processing — which requires processing Faces guard. In other words, the two things Ring is actively promoting as flagship strengths — AI-powered recognition of who’s at your door, and true privacy from Ring itself — are the same thing. You can have one or the other but not both.

As for whether Ring users should be concerned about their photos ending up in front of a government agency, Siminoff said no — public requests are only processed through local law enforcement channels — and pointed to Ring’s transparent reporting on government images. He did not take what happens when that border proves to be strong.

Incredibly, Siminoff built on something bigger than metal doorbells. Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field and is now quietly moving into business security with a new “elite” camera line and security trailer product. He acknowledged that small businesses are already pulling Ring into their properties, whether Ring markets to them or not. He is also open to foreign drones – “if we can get the costs in a place where it makes sense” – and to obtaining license plates, which the former partner of Ring Flock Safety has made his main business, he refused to say that he has never. (When asked specifically if it was something Ring could explore, he said Ring was “absolutely not working” on it today but then added: “It’s very hard to say we won’t do something in the future.”)

He put everything in the belief that he has had since the beginning of the company, that each house is a domain controlled by its owner, and the residents must be able to choose whether they participate in the cooperation of the neighbors if something happens.

Alas, at a moment when an NPR investigation has documented federal agents filming and tagging civilians who were doing nothing but witnessing an arrest, and when the kidnapping case has become a national talking point for both cameras and privacy, the question is not just whether Ring’s intrusion was well-designed. That what Ring is building — including a network of tens of millions of cameras, AI-powered search, and facial recognition — can always be as kind as Siminoff might have intended, no matter who’s in power, what cooperation it gets, and how the data flows.