Amazon’s Ring is rolling out a controversial, AI-powered facial recognition feature for video doorbells

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

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

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

This feature has already received opposition from consumer organizations, such as the EFF, and from a US Senator.

Amazon Ring owners can use this feature to help them disable alerts they don’t want to see — like those notifications indicating their comings and goings, for example, the company says. 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 settings.

Meanwhile, faces in the app can be named directly from the Event History section or from the library of new familiar faces. Once a face is rated, it will be labeled in all notifications, in the app timeline, and in your event history. These labels can be modified at any time, and there are tools to merge duplicates or delete faces.

Amazon claims that facial data is encrypted and never shared with others. Additionally, unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days.

Privacy Concerns About AI Facial Recognition

Despite Amazon’s privacy guarantees, adding this feature raises concerns.

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

Ring’s security efforts have failed in the past.

Ring was forced to pay a $5.8 million fine in 2023 after the US Federal Trade Commission found that Ring employees and contractors had widespread and unfettered access to customers’ private videos for years. The Neighbors app also revealed users’ home addresses and precise locations, and users’ Ring passwords have been floating around on the dark web for years.

Given Amazon’s willingness to work with law enforcement and digital surveillance providers, as well as its poor security record, we 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 privacy concerns, Amazon’s Ring has already faced calls from US Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to abandon the feature, and is facing backlash from consumer advocacy organizations, such as the EFF. The EFF also noted that privacy laws prevent Amazon from launching the feature in Illinois, Texas, Portland, and Oregon.

In response to questions raised by the organization, Amazon said that users’ biometric data would be processed in the cloud and claimed that it was not using the data to train AI models. It also claimed that it would not be able to technically identify all the locations where a person was detected, even if law enforcement requested such data.

However, it’s not clear why that wouldn’t be the case, given the similarity to the “Search Party” feature that searches through Ring’s network of neighborhood cameras to find missing dogs and cats.

Reached for comment, EFF staff attorney F. Mario Trujillo said, “Knocking on a door, or even just walking in front of it, should not require giving up your privacy. With this feature going live, it is more important than ever for state privacy regulators to step in to investigate and protect people’s privacy and test the strength of their biometric privacy laws.”

Updated after publication with EFF comment.