Amazon’s Ring Rolls Out Controversial AI-Based Facial Recognition Feature for Video Doorbells

Dystopian or useful? Amazon’s Ring doorbells will now be able to identify your visitors with a new AI-powered facial recognition feature, the company announced Tuesday. The controversial feature, dubbed “Familiar Faces,” was announced earlier in September and is now rolling out to Ring device owners in the United States.

Amazon says this feature allows you to identify people who regularly come to your door by creating a catalog of up to 50 faces. These may include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff and others. After tagging someone in the Ring app, the device will recognize them when they approach the Ring camera.

Then, instead of notifying you that “someone is at your door,” you’ll receive a personalized notification, like “Mom at the front door,” the company explains in its launch announcement.

This feature has already been rejected by consumer protection organizations, such as the EFF, and by a US senator.

Amazon Ring owners can use this feature to help them turn off alerts they don’t want to see, like notifications that reference their own whereabouts, for example, the company says. And they can set these alerts for each face.

The feature is not enabled by default. Instead, users will have to enable it in their app settings.

Meanwhile, faces can be named in the app directly from the Event History section or from the new familiar faces library. Once tagged, the face will be named in all notifications, in the app timeline, and in event history. These labels can be changed at any time and there are tools to merge duplicates or remove faces.

Amazon says facial data is encrypted and never shared with others. Additionally, it states that anonymous faces are automatically deleted after 30 days.

Privacy concerns with AI facial recognition

Despite Amazon’s privacy guarantees, there are concerns about adding this feature.

The company has a history of forging partnerships with law enforcement and once even gave police and firefighters the ability to request data from the Ring Neighbors app by asking Amazon directly for people’s doorbell footage. Most recently, Amazon partnered with Flock, the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras used by police, federal law enforcement, and ICE.

Ring’s own security efforts have failed in the past.

Ring had to pay a $5.8 million fine in 2023 after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that Ring employees and contractors had broad and unrestricted access to customer videos for years. Its Neighbors app also exposed users’ home addresses and precise locations, and users’ Ring passwords have been circulating on the dark web for years.

Given Amazon’s willingness to work with law enforcement and digital surveillance vendors, combined with its poor security track record, we suggest Ring owners, at the very least, be careful to identify anyone using their proper name; Better yet, keep the feature disabled and just see who it is. Not everything needs an AI upgrade.

Due to privacy concerns, Amazon’s Ring has already faced calls from U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to drop the feature, and is facing backlash from consumer protection organizations, like the EFF. Privacy laws prevent Amazon from launching the feature in Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon, the EFF also noted.

In response to questions posed by the organization, Amazon said users’ biometric data would be processed in the cloud and asserted that it does not use this data to train AI models. He also said he wouldn’t be able to identify every location where a person was detected, from a technical standpoint, even if law enforcement requested that data.

However, it’s unclear why this wouldn’t be the case, given the similarity to the “Search Party” feature which examines a neighborhood’s Ring camera network to find lost dogs and cats.