Dystopian or useful? Amazon’s Ring doorbells will now be able to identify your visitors through a new AI-powered facial-recognition feature, the company said on Tuesday. The controversial feature, dubbed “Familiar Faces,” was announced earlier this September and is now rolling out to Ring device owners in the United States.
Amazon says the feature lets you identify the people who regularly come to your door by creating a catalog of up to 50 faces. These could include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff, and others. After you label someone in the Ring app, the device will recognize them as they approach the Ring’s camera.
Then, instead of alerting you that “a person is at your door,” you’ll receive a personalized notification, like “Mom at Front Door,” the company explains in its launch announcement.
The feature has already received pushback from consumer protection organizations, like the EFF, and a U.S. senator.
Amazon Ring owners can use the feature to help them disable alerts they don’t want to see — like those notifications referencing their own comings and goings, for instance, the company says. And they can set these alerts on a per-face basis.
The feature is not enabled by default. Instead, users will need to turn it on in their app’s settings.
Meanwhile, faces can be named in the app directly from the Event History section or from the new Familiar Faces library. Once labeled, the face will be named in all notifications, in the app’s timeline, and in the Event History. These labels can be edited at any time, and there are tools to merge duplicates or delete faces.
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Amazon claims the face data is encrypted and never shared with others. Plus, it says unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days.
Privacy concerns over AI facial recognition
Despite Amazon’s privacy assurances, the addition of the feature raises concerns.
The company has a history of forging partnerships with law enforcement and even once gave police and fire departments the ability to request data from the Ring Neighbors app by asking Amazon directly for people’s doorbell footage. More 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 fallen short 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 customers’ videos for years. Its Neighbors app also exposed users’ home addresses and precise locations, and users’ Ring passwords have been floating around the dark web for years.
Given Amazon’s willingness to work with law enforcement and digital surveillance providers, combined with its poor security track record, we’d suggest Ring owners, at the very least, be careful about identifying anyone using their proper name; better yet, keep the feature disabled and just look to see who it is. Not everything needs an AI upgrade.
As a result of the privacy concerns, Amazon’s Ring has already faced calls from U.S. senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to abandon this feature, and is facing backlash from consumer protection organizations, like the EFF. Privacy laws are preventing Amazon from launching the feature in Illinois, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, the EFF had also noted.
In response to questions posed by the organization, Amazon said the users’ biometric data will be processed in the cloud and claimed it doesn’t use the data to train AI models. It also claimed it wouldn’t be able to identify all the locations where a person had been detected, from a technical standpoint, even if law enforcement requested this data.
However, it’s unclear why that would not be the case, given the similarity to the “Search Party” feature that looks across a neighborhood’s network of Ring cameras to find lost dogs and cats.
Reached for comment, EFF’s Staff Attorney, F. Mario Trujillo, said, “Knocking on a door, or even just walking in front of it, shouldn’t require abandoning your privacy. With this feature going live, it’s more important than ever that state privacy regulators step in to investigate, protect people’s privacy, and test the strength of their biometric privacy laws.”
Updated after publication with EFF comment.
