The Ring’s Jamie Siminoff has been trying to quell privacy fears since the Super Bowl, but his answers won’t help.

When Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff decided to use the company’s first Super Bowl ad to introduce Search Party – an AI-powered product that uses Ring camera footage to help find lost dogs – he hoped Americans would love it. Instead, the TV station lit up a storm.

In fact, since it was released in February, Siminoff has been around CNN, NBC, and in the pages of the New York Times, explaining that his critics don’t understand what Ring is doing. He sat down with TechCrunch a few days ago to explain his case, and although he was honest and willing to revise the story, some of his answers may raise new questions among those who are not already aware of the growth of home surveillance.

What is at the center of the argument is not clear, and what we discussed a straight path when it was first released. The dog disappears; Encourage nearby camera owners to ask if the animal appears in their photos; users can respond or ignore the request completely and remain invisible to everyone involved. Siminoff leaned heavily on this throughout our conversation – the idea that doing nothing is like getting out, that no one is allowed to do anything.

“It’s 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 they believe led to the change was what was seen at the Super Bowl site: a map showing blue circles popping up from house to house as cameras were turned on in the neighborhood. “I would change that,” he said. “It was not our job to try to get anyone to answer.”

But Ring chose a difficult time to present his case. Nancy Guthrie – the 84-year-old mother of Today Show Anchor Savannah Guthrie – left her home in Tucson on January 31, when blood stains that were confirmed to be hers were found in the home. A video of a Google Nest camera at the site, showing a masked man trying to block the lens with leaves, has swept the Internet and put home surveillance cameras in the midst of a global debate over security, privacy, and who gets to watch who.

Siminoff leaned on Guthrie’s case rather than distanced himself from it. In a separate interview and Fortune, argued that it was controversial to install more cameras in more buildings. “I believe if they had more (footage from Guthrie’s home), if there were more cameras around the house, I think we could have solved” the case, he said. The Ring network, he said, showed a suspicious vehicle about two and a half miles from Guthrie.

Whether you find it stimulating or distracting depends on your perspective. Siminoff clearly believes that video is good, but others can look at the same words and see the company’s founder using theft to get more of his products into the hands of consumers.

In any case, Search Party’s displeasure isn’t limited to commercial forums. This feature is next to two others – Fire Watch, which uses a neighborhood fire map, and Community Requests, which allows local law enforcement to ask Hive users in a certain area if they have any footage of an incident. Ring also launched Public Solicitation in September through a partnership with Axon, a company that makes police cameras and tasers, and uses the evidence management platform Evidence.com. (Axon and Ring announced the deal in April of last year, shortly after Siminoff he rejoined the company after leaving in 2023.)

The previous version of it agreement affected by Flock Safety, which uses AI-powered license readers. Hold on terminated that contract A few days after the Super Bowl ad aired, mentioning the “job” it would create is a cause for concern.

When asked directly, Siminoff declined to say whether Flock had reported that sharing data with US Customs and Border Protection had taken any action. (Many cities across the US cut ties with Flock over the same issue.) But the timing of Ring’s decision was notable. While Siminoff believes customers are misreading his products, he fully understands that Ring can’t solve their concerns, especially right now.

None of this happens in isolation. A few days ago, NPR reported on this your search was compiled from dozens of accounts from people found caught up in the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding surveillance tools, including US citizens with no immigration problems. One woman, a law enforcement witness following an ICE vehicle in Minneapolis in late January, described an undercover agent who leaned out the window, photographed her, and gave her her name and home address. “Their message was not subtle,” he told NPR. They were saying, we see you.

Siminoff seems to have a deep understanding that his answers about Ring’s actions carry extra weight. When we talked, he pointed to end-to-end encryption as Ring’s strongest encryption protection and confirmed that when it’s turned on, even Ring operators can’t see the footage, because decryption requires a password tied to the user’s device. He described this as the first business of the residential camera industry.

The question of face recognition is where things get really messy. Ring released a segment called Face Faces in December, two months before the Super Bowl ad. It allows users to sort up to 50 frequent visitors – family members, delivery drivers, neighbors – so that instead of a traffic alert of any kind, you receive notifications that say “Mom at Home.” Siminoff elaborated on this aspect in our interview, saying that he receives alerts, for example, when his son is on the way. He compared it to the practice of face recognition here at TSA checkpoints — which means people have already made peace with this kind of thing. When asked about the consent of people who appear on the Ring’s camera but did not agree to be recorded, he said that the Ring follows local and state laws.

He was also cautious when asked if Amazon uses Ring’s facial recognition. “Amazon doesn’t get that,” he said, then added: “If a customer, in the future, wants to join them to do something, maybe you can see that happen.”

He also offered that end-to-end encryption is an entry-level feature: users have to manage it manually in the Ring app’s Control Center. But according to Ring’s own supporting documentsthe exchange of making it slippery. The list of features that are stopped by end-to-end encryption include event timing, rich notifications, quick response, access to videos on Ring.com, user classification, AI video search, 24/7 video recording, pre-roll, snapshot recording, bird’s eye view, human recognition, AI video description, video preview, Faces security – which requires the improvement of Faces security. In other words, the two things the ring is promoting as a model skill – the AI-driven recognition of who is at your door, and the real secrets from the ring itself – are different. You can have one or the other but not both.

As for whether Ring users should be concerned about their disclosures in front of the immigration agency, Siminoff said no — community requests only use local security measures — and pointed to Ring’s public disclosure report on government documents. He did not take what happens when the limit proves that he does not have.

Unsurprisingly, Siminoff is making something bigger than doorbell cameras. Ring has over 100 million cameras in the field and is now quietly entering the business security space with a new line of “elite” camera and security trailers. He acknowledged that small businesses have been pulling Ring into their properties in the past, whether they’ve sold the Ring to them or not. They are also open to foreign drones – “if we can get a tree in the place where it was heard” – and on the recognition of the license plate, which Ring, a former partner of Flock Safety has made his main business, he refused to say no. (When asked directly if it was something Ring would investigate, he said Ring was “not working” today but then added: “It’s hard to say we won’t do something in the future.”)

He does all of this through the belief he says he has had since the company’s inception, that every building is an owner-managed community, and residents can decide whether to participate in the neighborhood association in case something happens.

Unfortunately, at a time when NPR’s investigation documented officers filming and identifying civilians who did nothing more than witness an arrest, and when a kidnapping case becomes a subject of camera communications and national secrets, the question is not only about whether the ring’s entry system was properly designed. It’s as if what Ring is building — including tens of millions of cameras, AI-powered searches, and facial recognition — can still be as good as Siminoff thinks, regardless of who has the power, what relationships are involved, and how the data flows.