In perhaps the least surprising news of the decade, a leaked email confirms Ring had every intention of tracking people and not just pets with its doorbells.

Ring, a home security company known for its widely adopted video doorbells, bought a Super Bowl ad space. And, within 30 seconds, the company managed to kill off any remaining goodwill it had with the general public, forcing it to back off from a proposed partnership with Flock Safety.

The idea was pitched as harmless. You mark your dog missing, the other cameras in your neighborhood keep an eye out for your dog, and if found, you get an alert.

Unfortunately, as everyone suspected, this was never about dogs.

A leaked email obtained by 404 Media confirms what everyone already knew: the feature was never designed to find dogs. It was always about targeting people.

"This is by far the most innovation that we have launched in the history of Ring. And it is not only the quantity, but quality," Jamie Siminoff wrote in an email to employees. "I believe that the foundation we created with Search Party, first for finding dogs, will end up becoming one of the most important pieces of tech and innovation to truly unlock the impact of our mission."

"You can now see a future where we are able to zero out crime in neighborhoods. So many things to do to get there but for the first time ever we have the chance to fully complete what we started."

This has always been Siminoff's goal. He was the reason Ring worked with police departments in the first place.

And, as 404 notes, when Siminoff left in 2023, the company backed off from partnerships with police departments. But when he returned in 2025, he seemed more than willing to rebuild those bridges.

Ring has gone on record as saying that Search Party was purpose-built for tracking pets, and that "it does not process human biometrics or track people." Unfortunately, that's a bit hard to believe based on Siminoff's propensity to see Ring as anything other than a tool to eradicate crime.

First pets, then people

When I first saw the Ring commercial, I was disgusted. That being said, I wasn't exactly surprised, either.

This isn't my first rodeo.

The tech industry has a habit of attempting to soften the blow of the invasive by making it seem, for lack of a better term, cute — at least at first. And they do this by exploiting our love for our furry friends first.

Take pet DNA testing, for example. A lot of people are hesitant to send a spit-soaked swab to a random address in North Carolina — and for good reason.

In 2023, 23andMe had a massive data breach that resulted in 6.9 million people having their data stolen. It included their genetic profiles, yes, but more alarmingly, it also linked that information to their name, birth year, location, and photographs, according to the HIPAA Journal.

As most of you know, once certain information about you has been leaked, it's alarmingly easy to cross-reference that with other data breaches. This is one of the more common ways malicious actors can pinpoint your social security number and credit card information.

But you know who doesn't have a Social Security number or credit card? Your dog.

And while it's true that direct-to-consumer human DNA test kits predate those used on pets, the launch of pet DNA kits has played an instrumental role in popularizing the human kits.

Swabbing the inside of your dog's mouth and dropping it off into a mailbox seems decidedly less creepy. And once someone's used to that idea, it's a bit easier to sell them on the idea of doing it for themselves. This is a perfect example of the "boiling frog" analogy.

It's also a great way to get paid directly by customers for research and development on nascent technology. Everyone remembers Elizabeth Holmes, the biotech engineer, who was convicted of defrauding investors related to her Edison blood testing device.

However, not everyone may know about her partner, Billy Evans. Evans has a biotech startup, Haemanthus, that effectively does the same thing.

Haemanthus plans to start blood testing pets before progressing to humans. If it progresses to humans.

And, of course, when you set aside the ethics and money, there's always the fact that the regulations are significantly looser around pet-focused products and services. It's a good way to refine a product without all the messy regulatory filing.

I suspect this is a trend we will see growing over the next several decades. So the next time you see a company promising to do something for your pets, don't be too surprised if you see them attempting to do the same thing for humans in the future.