Amazon’s Ring rolls out controversial, AI-powered facial recognition feature to video doorbells

Dystopian or useful? Amazon’s Ring doorbells can now identify your visitors through a new AI-powered facial recognition feature, the company said Tuesday. The controversial feature, called ‘Familiar Faces’, was announced earlier this September and is now rolling out to Ring device owners in the United States.

Amazon says this feature lets you identify the people who come to your door regularly by creating a catalog of up to 50 faces. This may include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery people, domestic workers and others. After you tag someone in the Ring app, the device recognizes them as they approach the Ring camera.

Then, instead of alerting you that “someone is at the door,” you’ll receive a personalized notification, such as “Mom at the front door,” the company explains in the launch announcement.

The feature has already drawn criticism from consumer protection groups, such as the EFFAnd a US senator.

Amazon Ring owners can use the feature to turn off alerts they don’t want to see, such as those that reference their own comings and goings, the company says. And they can set these alerts per face.

The feature is not enabled by default. Instead, users must enable it in their app’s settings.

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

Amazon claims the facial data is encrypted and never shared with others. Additionally, it says that unnamed faces will be automatically deleted after 30 days.

Privacy concerns about AI facial recognition

Despite Amazon’s privacy safeguards, the addition of the feature raises concerns.

The company has a history of forging partnerships with law enforcement agencies, 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 was ordered 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. The Neighbors app also revealed 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 record, we recommend that Ring owners at least be cautious 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.) leave this positionand faces backlash from consumer protection groups such as the EFF. Privacy laws prevent Amazon from launching the feature Illinois, Texasand Portland, Oregon, the EFF had also noted.

In response to questions the organization asksAmazon said users’ biometric data will be processed in the cloud and claimed it does not use the data to train AI models. It also claimed that from a technical point of view it would not be able to identify all locations where a person had been detected, even if the police asked for this data.

It’s unclear why that wouldn’t be the case, though, given its similarity to the “Search Party” feature that looks through a neighborhood’s network of Ring cameras to find lost dogs and cats.