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Ring’s Jamie Siminoff is still trying to calm privacy fears, but his answers may not help Connie Loizos 9:35 PM PDT · March 8, 2026 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.
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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.
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