Unsurprisingly, Siminoff is building toward something bigger than doorbell cameras. Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field and is now quietly dipping a toe into enterprise security with a new “elite” camera line and a security trailer product. He said that small businesses have been pulling Ring into their spaces already, whether Ring markets to them or not. He’s also open to outdoor drones — “if we could get the cost in a place where it made sense” — *and on license plate detection, which Ring’s now-former-partner Flock Safety has made its core business, he declined to say never. (Ring is “definitely not” working on it today, he’d said when asked whether it’s something Ring might explore. After a beat, he added that “it’s very hard to say we’re never going to do something in the future.”)* Siminoff frames all of it through a belief he says he has held from the start of the company, that each home is a node controlled by its owner, and residents should be able to choose whether to participate in neighborhood-level cooperation when something happens. Alas, in a moment when an NPR investigation has documented federal agents photographing and identifying civilians who were doing nothing more than observing arrests, and when a kidnapping case has become a national talking point about both cameras and privacy, the question isn’t just about whether Ring’s opt-in framework is designed well. It’s whether what Ring is building — including a network of tens of millions of cameras, AI-powered search, and facial recognition — can remain as benign as Siminoff may well intend it, regardless of who is in power, what partnerships get struck, and how the data flows.