Ring Introduces Facial Recognition That Works Even at Night  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Personalized Doorbell Alerts** - Ring's Familiar Faces labels up to 50 people so notifications become personalized instead of generic person alerts. - Jaeden Schafer argues this reduces nuisance alerts from frequent visitors like family and delivery drivers. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer All right, so Amazon's new Ring doorbells is going to be able to identify any visitors that come to your front door through a new AI powered facial recognition feature. This is kind of controversial. They're calling this new feature familiar faces. And it was announced earlier in September, but they're finally rolling it out to anyone in the United States. Amazon says that this is going to let you identify people that you don't come to your house very regularly. They're going to let you catalog up to 50 faces. They kind of have a max at 50. And these could be your family members, your friends, your neighbors, delivery drivers, you know, household staff and anyone else. And after you label someone in the Ring app, so you actually have to go in and label someone. Basically, when people come, it'll have some sort of screenshot of their face that'll show up inside of the app. And you can put a label and a name to that person's face. But after you do that, then the ring camera is going to recognize them as they come up to your door in the future. So instead of having, you know, an alert that pops up on your phone that says, you know, a person is at your door, you're going to get a personalized notification and you can you can customize The notifications a little bit more where it'd be something like mom is at the front door, or you know, your your wife is at the front door or your kid or whoever, right? So it'll tell you exactly who is at the front door. I think this is good in some sense. I mean, it's kind of annoying to have 100 persons at your front door all day long notifications, especially from people that are just like your family, maybe like, you know, your spouse Or your kids that visit the house all day long because it's your house. You don't want to get notified every single time necessarily. So you could turn on notifications for each of them. ([Time 0:01:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80d0f6fb-5f8e-4fa6-96ad-27ec0337abf3)) - **Opt In And Manage Your Face Library** - Don't assume Familiar Faces is enabled by default; Jaeden emphasizes users must opt in through app settings. - He advises editing labels, merging duplicates, or deleting faces to manage your library and notifications. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer I will mention to Amazon's credit, it's not enabled by default, you're going to have to go and turn it on in the apps settings. But what I will say is that while faces can be named in the app directly, you can do that in the event history section or from the new familiar faces library. Once you label the face, you know, it's going to be named in all of the notifications and in the app's timeline and in the event history. So these labels you can then edit at any time. They also have a bunch of tools to merge duplicates or delete faces. So like this is a fairly well thought out feature. They have a bunch of, you know, capabilities to go and edit everything. And Amazon says that the face data is encrypted. They say that they will never share with other people. They also say that, you know, unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days. Like, yes, ([Time 0:03:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/42270053-635c-460e-8369-5626e126ed81)) - **Police Access To Ring Footage** - Jaeden recounts that police could request footage directly from Ring and previously accessed Neighborhoods app data. - He explains why people feel that's intrusive compared with police asking homeowners for footage in person. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer And I think they even once gave police and fire departments the ability to request data from the Ring Neighborhoods app. Now, it's so tricky because, like, on the one hand, yes, this is kind of, this is very useful for the police, right? You could imagine if there is some sort of burglary in one house, you'd want to be able to request all the Ring data from all the houses around you. But on the other hand, it's tricky because, you know, this is typically something you need like a warrant for. And there's all sorts of gray areas. There is this thing called the Ring Neighbors app. And the police were able to essentially request from Amazon directly from, you know, getting footage directly from people's doorbells. And the thing that I think people don't like about this or what some people push back on is, you know, it feels sort of like, well, this is my doorbell. This is my camera I set up and having, you know, a police, for example, instead of knocking on my door and asking me if they could see my footage to go straight to Amazon and like get footage Off of something that feels like mine, which is primarily recording myself. ([Time 0:04:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b661515a-f5c1-46f1-8d62-6c74a70a61c2)) - **Past Data Breaches And Fines** - Jaeden shares past incidents where Ring and Alexa data access mistakes exposed user data unintentionally. - He highlights a $5.8M FTC fine for broad Ring employee access and leaked passwords as examples. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer I know, for example, Amazon and Alexa have had some kerfuffles in the past where they've accidentally like you can request your data from an Amazon Alexa, for example, what it records On you. And I remember hearing the story of, I mean, is obviously an anecdote, but someone said that they requested their data from Amazon's Alexa, they were given a bunch of audio files that The Amazon Alexa had recorded of them. And it turned out to be like their neighbor or like some other person that wasn't them. And so, you know, they just like gave some random person, some other random person's audio files, which had, you know, include them singing in the shower, among other things. And so I think that was a major red flag. And definitely feels like if the wires can get crossed there, a camera at your front door could be not super great. So Ring had to pay a $5.8 million fine back in 2023 after the US Federal Trade Commission found that Ring employees and contractors had broad and basically unrestricted access to customers' Video for years on their neighbor's app. ([Time 0:06:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/82e60cc2-ed49-42d5-b13f-1c628be04772)) - **Regulatory Pushback And State Bans** - Critics including Senator Ed Markey and the EFF call for abandoning the feature due to privacy concerns. - Jaeden notes four U.S. jurisdictions currently block the launch over legal and privacy issues. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer Senator, Ed Markey from Massachusetts, to abandon the feature. I don't think that they are going to, because I can see, you know, when there's like a genuine use case, it's not illegal. I think they'll roll it out and let people use it on a, you know, on a basis of who wants it. Then there's, of course, the EFF that is also giving them some backlash to consumer protection organization. There are some privacy laws that are preventing Amazon from launching it in Illinois, Texas, Portland, and Oregon, which is interesting, right? You have red states and blue states. It seems pretty, pretty, you know, nonpartisan of an issue. ([Time 0:07:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c2f7ef45-1f6a-4c19-b1da-88437071f8d2)) - **Limits Claimed On Biometric Use** - Amazon says biometric processing occurs in the cloud and won't train AI models or tag face geolocations. - Jaeden flags tension with features like Search Party that already search neighborhood cameras for lost pets. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer And in response to all of those, Amazon said that users' biometric data is going to be processed in the cloud, and they claim that it is not going to be used to train AI models. It also claims it won't be able to identify all of the locations where a person had been detected. So basically, like, it's not going to geo, it's not going to add a geolocation to the facial recognition data, which is kind of interesting, because they also have a feature called search Party, which like looks across the whole neighborhood network of ring cameras to find lost dogs and cats. And technically, you could have that same feature just on facial recognition. But I guess they're gonna try to turn that off. So it's not, you know, tagging geolocation of faces. ([Time 0:08:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecdf69bc-2789-4978-8ef0-e6b52e024706))