TL;DR: Amazon's Ring doorbells now identify people by face. The "Familiar Faces" feature sends alerts like "Mom at Front Door" after scanning visitors' facial geometry. You opt in, but the people being scanned can't opt out. Amazon stores biometric data on its servers. Three states already banned it.
How Familiar Faces Works
Ring started rolling out facial recognition to doorbell owners across the US. Call it "Familiar Faces." You label up to 50 people in the Ring app (family members, friends, regular delivery drivers) and the camera recognizes them when they approach. Instead of "Motion Detected at Front Door," you get "Sarah at Front Door."
The camera analyzes facial geometry every time someone comes into view. Family member, delivery driver, neighbor walking their dog: everyone gets scanned. The feature isn't on by default. You activate it manually. But once you do, your Ring camera becomes a biometric data collection point for everyone who passes by.
Processing happens in the cloud on Amazon's servers. Face scans upload to Amazon, get analyzed, matched against your labeled catalog, then trigger personalized notifications. Amazon claims it uses encryption, access controls, and database isolation to protect the data. Those same promises existed before employees got caught watching customer videos.
The Consent Asymmetry
You opt in to use Familiar Faces. The people being scanned don't get that choice. Your mail carrier, your neighbor's kids cutting through your yard, the Instacart shopper dropping groceries: none of them consented to having their faceprints captured and stored on Amazon's servers.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation put it clearly: "When you step in front of one of these cameras, your faceprint is taken and stored on Amazon's servers, whether you consent or not." That's the core privacy violation. Biometric data collection without informed consent.
State biometric privacy laws require written consent before collecting faceprints. Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act is the strictest. You need informed, written consent before scanning someone's face. Violate it, and the person you scanned can sue you. That's why Ring blocked Familiar Faces in Illinois, Texas, and Portland, Oregon: states and cities with enforceable biometric privacy protections.
Amazon dumps compliance responsibility on users. The app reminds you of "consent obligations" and says you're responsible for using Ring products "consistent with local law." Translation: if you get sued for scanning your neighbor's face without permission, that's your problem, not Amazon's.
Where Your Data Goes
Facial data lives on Amazon's servers indefinitely unless you manually delete it. Amazon says unnamed faces get auto-deleted after 30 days. Labeled faces stick around until you remove them through the app. That means Amazon builds a biometric database of everyone you've tagged, accessible to Amazon engineers, vulnerable to breaches, and subject to law enforcement requests.
Privacy advocates argue that cloud processing makes Amazon directly liable for biometric data collection. When the scanning happens on-device and stays local, the device owner bears responsibility. When scans upload to company servers for processing, the company becomes a collector and processor of biometric information. That triggers state consent requirements and data retention limits.
Ring says users can delete face profiles anytime, which also removes corresponding biometric data. But Amazon doesn't specify how long deletion takes, whether backups get purged, or if machine learning models trained on that data get retrained. Once biometric data trains an AI model, the patterns extracted from your face become model weights. Deleting the source data doesn't delete what the model learned.
Ring's Privacy Track Record
Amazon has a history with Ring security failures. In May 2023, the FTC fined Ring $5.8 million for allowing employees and contractors unrestricted access to customer videos. Ring employees could access and download every customer's video with zero technical restrictions until July 2017.
One Ring employee viewed thousands of videos from at least 81 female users between June and August 2017, targeting cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms. That's not a system vulnerability. That's designed access with no oversight.
Security got worse. Ring experienced multiple credential-stuffing attacks in 2017 and 2018 but didn't implement multi-factor authentication until 2019. Between January 2019 and March 2020, over 55,000 US customers had Ring devices compromised through credential stuffing and brute force attacks. Hackers accessed hundreds of thousands of videos from bedrooms, children's rooms, and private spaces.
The FTC settlement required Ring to delete data products derived from unlawfully reviewed videos and maintain a data security program for 20 years. That means until 2043, the FTC will monitor Ring's security practices because the company proved it couldn't be trusted to protect customer privacy on its own.
Law Enforcement Access
Ring partners with over 2,000 police departments nationwide. Cops can request footage through the Neighbors app using a feature called Community Requests. Users decide whether to share. Voluntary sharing keeps it legal without warrants.
But Amazon reserves the right to share your Ring footage with police without your permission and without a warrant in cases involving "imminent danger of death or serious physical injury." In 2022, Amazon admitted to providing footage to police 11 times using that emergency exception.
In October 2025, Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety, the company behind automated license plate readers used by ICE, federal agencies, and local police. The partnership lets police using Flock request Ring doorbell footage to supplement vehicle tracking data. Flock builds location timelines by tracking license plates. Ring adds visual confirmation of who got in and out of the car.
Amazon received over 3,000 legal requests for Ring data in one recent year. Users got notified in only about 650 cases. That means roughly 78% of legal demands happened without the Ring owner knowing their footage went to authorities.
How to Protect Yourself
If you own a Ring camera, don't enable Familiar Faces. The feature offers convenience (personalized alerts instead of generic motion notifications) but trades biometric privacy for everyone who passes your camera. Your delivery driver shouldn't have their faceprint stored on Amazon's servers because you wanted custom notifications.
If you already enabled it, disable it through the Ring app's Control Center settings. Then manually delete all labeled face profiles. Check whether deletion actually happens by requesting your data from Amazon under state privacy laws if you're in California, Virginia, Colorado, or one of the twelve other states with data access rights.
Consider alternatives to Ring. Wyze, Eufy, Reolink, and UniFi offer doorbell cameras with local storage. Footage stays on your network. No cloud uploads means no company access, no law enforcement back doors, and no employee snooping. Some models support Home Assistant for fully local smart home integration.
If you walk past Ring cameras regularly (and you do, they're everywhere) you can't opt out of being scanned. Three million Ring doorbells were sold in 2023 alone. Your face is getting captured, uploaded, and analyzed whether you like it or not. Wear masks, hats, or sunglasses if you want to avoid facial geometry capture. Or push your state legislature to pass biometric privacy laws with private rights of action like Illinois has.
Where Familiar Faces is Blocked
Illinois banned Familiar Faces through the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires written consent before collecting biometric identifiers. Ring can't deploy facial recognition there without violating state law and exposing users to lawsuits.
Texas has a similar biometric privacy statute. Portland, Oregon banned facial recognition technology in both public and private spaces in 2020, making it illegal for businesses and residents to use facial recognition systems. Ring complies by blocking the feature in these jurisdictions.
The fact that Ring proactively blocks Familiar Faces in states with enforceable biometric laws tells you everything. The company knows the feature violates privacy principles. They just deploy it where laws are weak and enforcement is unlikely.
Fifteen states now have comprehensive privacy laws as of January 1, 2026, but most don't specifically regulate biometric data with consent requirements. If you're not in Illinois, Texas, or Portland, you're fair game for facial recognition doorbells.
Normalizing Surveillance
Ring cameras already normalized residential surveillance. Neighbors watching neighbors. Front porch footage shared in community apps. Law enforcement partnerships making private cameras into distributed surveillance networks. Familiar Faces takes it further: biometric identification of everyone passing residential properties.
This isn't government-imposed surveillance. It's consumer-grade, opt-in surveillance infrastructure sold as a safety product. Amazon makes it easy, convenient, and socially acceptable to scan faces at scale. Once facial recognition becomes normal for doorbell cameras, it spreads to security cameras, retail stores, apartment buildings, and workplaces.
The infrastructure is already there. Ring has millions of deployed cameras. Flock has thousands of license plate readers. Clearview AI scraped billions of faces from the internet. Put them together and you get real-time identification and tracking across public and private spaces. No warrant needed. Just consumer products and corporate partnerships.
If you don't want that future, don't buy into it. Skip Familiar Faces. Choose cameras that don't upload footage to corporate servers. Support biometric privacy legislation. Make surveillance expensive, difficult, and legally risky instead of easy and profitable.
References
- Fox News - Amazon Ring gets AI upgrade with controversial facial recognition feature
- Find Articles - Ring Familiar Faces Reportedly Violates State Privacy Laws
- FTC - Ring Employees Illegally Surveilled Customers, Failed to Stop Hackers
- TechCrunch - Amazon's Ring to pay $5.8M after staff caught snooping on customer videos
- TechCrunch - Amazon's Ring to partner with Flock, a network of AI cameras used by ICE
- Washington Post - Ring has partnered with 400 police forces, extending surveillance reach
- Kenney Legal Defense - Problems with Ring Giving Video Footage to Law Enforcement Without a Warrant