Jamie Siminoff, the founder and chief inventor of Ring, the ubiquitous doorbell camera, was excited for the company’s first Super Bowl television commercial. The 30-second ad presented its product helping with a task as unassailable as apple pie: finding lost dogs.
But since the ad aired, instead of a victory lap, Mr. Siminoff has been on an apology tour.
Or maybe an explanation tour. Whatever you call it, he is responding to a genuine public relations crisis.
The commercial showed a new Ring feature called Search Party, which uses artificial intelligence and images from its cameras to trace a lost pet’s wanderings across a neighborhood. Critics said the feature felt dystopian, showing the potential for far-reaching invasive surveillance. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a critic of corporate data collection, called out “the serious privacy and civil liberties risks” in Ring’s technology.
This week, Mr. Siminoff has made the rounds on TV news shows, trying to allay users’ concerns. He has been on CNN and NBC and talked to The New York Times on Wednesday.
The ad landed at a tense media moment involving home surveillance. In the search for Nancy Guthrie, the missing mother of the TV news anchor Savannah Guthrie, law enforcement agencies were able to recover footage from her Google Nest doorbell, despite reports that she did not have a subscription to the device.
But Ring, which is owned by Amazon, is so ubiquitous that is has become a generic term for any doorbell camera, and users raised questions about how much Ring was monitoring them.
Mr. Siminoff took pains in his media appearances to clarify Ring’s privacy policies. He said his company does not store users’ footage if they don’t have a subscription with Ring.
“You have the A.I. angst, you have the Nancy Guthrie thing happening,” Mr. Siminoff said, offering his explanation as to why the Super Bowl ad created such an outcry. “All this came together and it created a perfect storm and it just hit and exploded.”
Ring is trying to balance communicating what it does — using video to monitor homes and neighborhoods — and not agitating people who are wary of that very thing.
Mr. Siminoff defended his technology, saying that protecting privacy and providing useful tools for helping people are both possible. He said that he understood people’s concerns, and that maybe people were “triggered” by an image in the ad that showed blue rings radiating out from suburban homes. There will be fewer maps in any future ads, he said.
But the company had come under criticism, even before the Super Bowl ad, from people like Mr. Markey. Last week, Ring ended its partnership with Flock Safety, which operates A.I.-powered surveillance cameras that critics feared would allow government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement to gain access to user data. The partnership would have given Flock access to a tool to work with local law enforcement.
The company said users had to agree before their information was shared on Search Party. While the feature is on outdoor Ring cameras by default, “camera owners always control how their footage is shared in response to a Search Party request,” Meredith Chiricosta, a spokeswoman for Ring, said in an emailed statement. “Nothing is shared by default.”
Mr. Siminoff, who started Ring in his garage in Los Angeles, remains resolute that more video in the world is better. He believes that most people feel this way, too, even if they say they have misgivings.
“I think there’s been a lot of cases recently where if the video had not been there, I’m not sure if the story would have been told the same or we wouldn’t have known what happened,” he said.
But he gets that people want to have some measure of control.
“That’s the balance. It’s not just like unfettered mass surveillance,” he said. “That’s not what we have with Ring. You get to choose what you want to do with your individual home.”
Davia Temin, a longtime corporate crisis strategist, said Mr. Siminoff was emphasizing the most important point in this particular maelstrom.
“A C.E.O. who acknowledges that his company wants to give as much control to the consumer as possible — that is as healthy as it gets,” Ms. Temin, who runs the communications firm Davia Temin & Company, said. “Privacy will always be contested until we get to the next step.”
While the outcry over its Super Bowl commercial was intense, Mr. Siminoff, who had appeared in the ad with his dog Biscuit, said the company would move forward building out the Search Party feature. It hopes to be able to help people find their lost cats, a harder problem to solve than dogs.
“One of the biggest controversies we had for Search Party,” Mr. Siminoff said, “up until the Super Bowl commercial, was why don’t you have cats?”
Jordyn Holman is a Times business reporter covering management and writing the Corner Office column.
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