Amazon’s Ring is adding AI-powered facial recognition to its video doorbells in the United States, turning a familiar front-door alert into something more specific: a named visitor notification.
The feature, called Familiar Faces, is designed to recognize people who regularly appear at a user’s door. Amazon says it can make alerts more useful. Critics say it also brings biometric identification into one of the most ordinary places in daily life: the front step.
What Familiar Faces Does
Familiar Faces lets Ring owners create a catalog of up to 50 faces. Amazon says those faces can include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff, and others who regularly come to the door.
Once a person is labeled in the Ring app, the device can identify that person when they approach the camera. Instead of a generic alert saying that a person is at the door, the notification can name the visitor, such as Mom at Front Door.
Amazon says users can manage the feature inside the Ring app. Faces can be named from Event History or from the Familiar Faces library. Once a face is labeled, that label appears in notifications, in the app timeline, and in Event History.
The company also says labels can be changed later. Users can merge duplicate face entries or delete faces from the library.
Why Amazon Says Users Might Want It
Amazon presents the feature as a way to make Ring alerts more relevant. A doorbell camera often sees the same people many times, and a generic notification may not always be useful.
Ring owners can also use Familiar Faces to disable alerts they do not want. Amazon gives the example of people receiving notifications about their own comings and goings. The company says alerts can be controlled on a per-face basis.
That means the feature is not only about naming visitors. It is also about filtering the stream of motion and person alerts that a connected doorbell can generate.
Amazon says Familiar Faces is not turned on automatically. Users must enable it in the app’s settings before it begins working.
The Privacy Questions Are Immediate
The rollout has already drawn criticism from consumer protection organizations, including the EFF, and from U.S. senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The objections center on biometric data, surveillance, and Ring’s history with security and law enforcement access.
Amazon says face data is encrypted and not shared with others. It also says unnamed faces are automatically deleted after 30 days. In response to questions from the EFF, Amazon said users’ biometric data will be processed in the cloud and claimed it does not use the data to train AI models.
Amazon also claimed it would not be able to identify every location where a person had been detected, from a technical standpoint, even if law enforcement requested that data.
That claim has been questioned because of the similarity to Ring’s Search Party feature, which looks across a neighborhood network of Ring cameras to help find lost dogs and cats.
Ring’s Record Shapes the Reaction
The concerns are not appearing in a vacuum. The source article notes that Amazon has previously built partnerships with law enforcement. It also once allowed police and fire departments to request data from the Ring Neighbors app by asking Amazon directly for doorbell footage.
More recently, Amazon partnered with Flock, the maker of AI-powered surveillance cameras used by police, federal law enforcement, and a division of ICE, according to a 404Media report. Flock Safety later emailed after publication to say that ICE is not using Flock.
Ring has also faced security problems. In 2023, Ring had to pay a $5.8 million fine 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 exposed users’ home addresses and precise locations. Ring passwords have also been found on the dark web for years.
For critics, that background matters. A feature that identifies faces at the front door depends on trust in how biometric data is stored, processed, protected, and limited.
Where the Feature Is Not Launching
Amazon is rolling out Familiar Faces to Ring device owners in the United States, but not everywhere. The EFF noted that privacy laws are preventing Amazon from launching the feature in Illinois, Texas, and Portland, Oregon.
The feature has also prompted calls for Amazon’s Ring to abandon it. U.S. senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has called on Ring to drop the feature, and consumer protection organizations have pushed back as well.
EFF’s Staff Attorney, F. Mario Trujillo, framed the concern around ordinary public-facing activity near a home.
“Knocking on a door, or even just walking in front of it, shouldn’t require abandoning your privacy. With this feature going live, it’s more important than ever that state privacy regulators step in to investigate, protect people’s privacy, and test the strength of their biometric privacy laws.”
The practical choice for Ring owners is straightforward: use the feature only if the benefits outweigh the privacy tradeoff. Familiar Faces may make notifications more specific, but it also asks users to create and maintain a biometric catalog of people who appear at their door.
At minimum, users who enable it should think carefully before assigning proper names to faces. The more cautious option is to leave it disabled and keep checking the camera feed manually when a visitor appears.