Ring Now Scans Faces at Your Door. Here's What That Means. | State of Surveillance

TL;DR: Amazon's Ring doorbells now scan faces. The "Familiar Faces" feature rolled out in December 2025, letting your doorbell build a catalog of up to 50 people's faces. Ring says it's so you get alerts like "Mom at Front Door" instead of generic notifications. The EFF says it's "a feature that can easily be repurposed for mass surveillance." This is the same company that paid $5.8 million to the FTC after employees spent years watching customer videos. They've partnered with thousands of police departments. And now they want your neighbors' faces in a database.

What Ring Just Launched

In September 2025, Amazon announced "Familiar Faces" for Ring doorbells. By December, it started rolling out to US customers [1].

How it works:

Your Ring camera captures faces of people who approach
You label them in the app: "Mom," "Delivery Driver," "Neighbor"
Ring stores up to 50 faces per account
You get personalized alerts: "Mom at Front Door"
Unlabeled faces get deleted after 30 days (Amazon claims)

Sounds convenient. That's the point.

The Problem

Your doorbell doesn't just see your visitors. It sees everyone who walks by. The mail carrier. The neighbor's kid. The person walking their dog. Anyone on the sidewalk.

EFF Staff Attorney F. Mario Trujillo put it plainly: "Knocking on a door, or even just walking in front of it, shouldn't require abandoning your privacy" [2].

The EFF's bigger concern: "Today's feature to recognize your friend at your front door can easily be repurposed tomorrow for mass surveillance."

They're not wrong. Here's why.

Ring's Police Problem

Ring has been building relationships with law enforcement for years.

The track record:

Partnerships with over 2,000 police departments
Police could request footage directly through Ring's Neighbors app
Cops got access without warrants in many cases
Ring marketed itself to police as a surveillance network

The latest partnership: Ring recently teamed up with Flock Safety [3]. Flock makes AI-powered license plate readers used by police departments, federal agencies, and ICE. The company that scans your visitors' faces now partners with a company that tracks vehicles for law enforcement.

Connect those dots.

That $5.8 Million Fine

In 2023, the FTC fined Amazon Ring $5.8 million [4]. The reason? Ring employees and contractors had "unrestricted access to customer videos for years."

What the FTC found:

Employees could watch any customer's video feeds
One employee viewed thousands of videos of female customers
Security was so poor that customer credentials ended up on the dark web
Ring knew about these problems and didn't fix them fast enough

This is the company now storing facial recognition data. Amazon says the face data is encrypted. They said customer videos were secure too.

Where Ring Can't Do This

Three places blocked Familiar Faces before it even launched:

Illinois, BIPA law lets individuals sue over biometric data collection
Texas, State biometric privacy law prohibits this without consent
Portland, Oregon, City banned facial recognition in private settings

Amazon didn't block these areas out of respect for privacy. They blocked them because they could get sued.

If you're in one of these places, your Ring can't scan faces. If you're anywhere else in America, it can.

Senator Markey's Demands

Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) didn't wait for the launch. He sent Amazon a letter demanding they abandon the feature entirely [5].

What Markey wants to know:

Does Ring share biometric data with law enforcement?
Does Ring share data with DHS or ICE?
Can police request access to facial recognition data?
Can cops get live access to Ring camera streams?

Amazon hasn't answered these questions publicly. They claim they "can't" identify all locations where a person was detected, even if police asked. Note the word "can't", not "won't."

How to Turn This Off

Familiar Faces is opt-in. It's disabled by default. Here's how to make sure it stays off:

Open the Ring app
Go to Account → Account Settings
Select Privacy Settings
Find Familiar Faces
Make sure it's toggled OFF

But here's the thing: You can't control your neighbors' Ring cameras. If they enable Familiar Faces, your face goes in their database every time you walk by. You have no say in it.

The Bigger Picture

There are over 10 million Ring devices in the US. Each one is a potential node in a facial recognition network.

What's being built:

Millions of cameras covering streets, porches, driveways
Facial recognition databases in millions of homes
Police partnerships that facilitate data access
A company with a history of security failures managing it all

Ring sold customers on security. What they built is surveillance infrastructure that happens to be in your hands instead of the government's. For now.

What You Can Do

If you own a Ring:

Disable Familiar Faces and don't enable it
Review your video sharing settings
Turn off Neighbors app data sharing with police
Consider whether you need a Ring at all

If you don't own a Ring but your neighbors do:

You have limited options, this is the problem
Illinois, Texas, and Portland residents have legal recourse
Support biometric privacy legislation in your state
Be aware that your face may be in multiple private databases

Alternatives to Ring:

Local-only cameras that don't upload to the cloud
Systems you control without corporate intermediaries
Cameras without facial recognition features

The Bottom Line

Amazon Ring now scans faces. They say it's for convenience. They say the data is encrypted. They say you can opt out.

They also said your videos were secure when employees were watching them for years. They've built partnerships with thousands of police departments. They're now partnered with companies that help ICE track people.

Familiar Faces isn't about telling you when Mom arrives. It's about normalizing facial recognition so pervasive that every doorbell becomes a surveillance camera and every sidewalk becomes a database entry.

You can turn off your Ring's face scanning. You can't turn off your neighbor's.