Facial recognition technology is increasingly used in airports, police investigations and sports venues.
Now Amazon’s Ring says it’s putting facial recognition for the first time into its home security doorbells and video cameras. It’s intended to identify your sister, a neighbor or other people you know.
While the feature will be optional for Ring device owners, privacy advocates say it’s unfair that wherever the technology is in use, anyone within sight will have their faces scanned to determine who’s a friend or stranger.
The Ring feature is “invasive for anyone who walks within range of your Ring doorbell,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the consumer advocacy and policy group Electronic Privacy Information Center. “They are not consenting to this.”
Ring spokeswoman Emma Daniels said that Ring’s features empower device owners to be responsible users of facial recognition and to comply with relevant laws that “may require obtaining consent prior to identifying people.” (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Other companies, including Google, already offer facial recognition for connected doorbells and cameras. You might use similar technology to unlock your iPhone or tag relatives in digital photo albums.
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But privacy watchdogs said that Ring’s use of facial recognition poses added risks, because the company’s products are embedded in our neighborhoods and have a history of raising social, privacy and legal questions.
How Ring’s facial recognition will work
The feature called “Familiar Faces” will be available for new Ring doorbells and security cameras starting in December. The company offered few details about the feature during a product announcement and in a post Tuesday, but agreed to answer my questions.
Daniels said that the feature will be turned off unless the Ring device owner chooses to enable it. Then, if you see your neighbor or a friend pop up in video footage from your Ring doorbell or security camera, you can tag them in the Ring app by name or by a moniker such as “neighbor.”
The next time that person shows up, you can get an alert that says Emma or “neighbor” is at the door, rather than the typical notice of, “There’s a person at your front door.”
Facial recognition features like this work by capturing the unique mathematical contours of each face, sometimes called a face template or faceprint. Each faceprint would then be compared to the previously identified faces in the Ring database, said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy advocacy group.
It’s typically legal to film in public places, including your doorway. And in most of the United States, your permission is not legally required to collect or use your faceprint.
Privacy experts said that Ring’s use of the technology risks crossing ethical boundaries because of its potential for widespread use in residential areas without people’s knowledge or consent.
You choose to unlock your iPhone by scanning your face. A food delivery courier, a child selling candy or someone walking by on the sidewalk is not consenting to have their face captured, stored and compared against Ring’s database, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director for the consumer advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“It’s troubling that companies are making a product that by design is taking biometric information from people who are doing the innocent act of walking onto a porch,” he said.
The Ring spokeswoman said that the facial recognition feature won’t be available in Illinois, Texas and Portland, Oregon, and it will be restricted “as a precaution” because of other state legislation.
Under Illinois and Texas laws, companies can face large fines unless they obtain permission to collect or use data from your body, including fingerprints and unique patterns derived from faces. Portland restricts use of facial recognition.
Schroeder doesn’t believe Ring’s facial recognition will be helpful enough to justify the concerns about its use.
If you needed to make sure the person ringing your doorbell was your regular house cleaner and not a possible burglar, Schroeder said that it’s good enough to peek outside or check regular camera footage rather than rely on error-prone facial recognition.
Cahn also said there could be risks of personal Ring databases of identified faces being stolen by cyberthieves, misused by Ring employees who might have access or shared with outsiders such as law enforcement.
Ring has in the past faced allegations of lax security enabling people to hijack home cameras, and of its employees and contractors viewing people’s private footage. In a 2023 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the company denied the claims and said it made privacy and security improvements on its own.
Amazon’s introduction of facial recognition may spell a reversal from a period in which large technology companies have been relatively cautious with facial recognition.
Companies, including Amazon, several years ago froze or restricted police use of their facial recognition technologies after concerns about potential misuse. Meta in 2021 shut down a facial recognition feature that had led to large legal settlements over tagging people in photos without permission. And so far, big companies including Google and Meta have refrained from adding facial recognition into smart glasses.
Schroeder said that increasingly capable artificial intelligence and changing public and political demands for security may be making facial recognition more palatable. “It feels like the social dynamics have really swung back in the other direction,” she said.
