Mazon was sued Monday over a facial recognition feature it recently added to its doorbells, in a complaint that opens up a familiar asymmetry: the person buying the camera approves it, and the person passing the camera doesn’t.
Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident, has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in federal court in Seattle, alleging that Ring’s “Ordinary Faces” captures and stores images of passers-by without their consent. He is seeking at least $5m in damages on behalf of the class, according to Reuters.
Familiar Faces is an optional setting that uses AI to recognize people the camera has seen before, so the notification says who’s at the door rather than whether someone is there. The ring launched late last year as part of an AI overhaul of its cameras, with users able to tag famous people and the system catalogs a fixed number of faces over time.
For the homeowner opening it, that’s easy. For a delivery driver, a neighbor, or a stranger mowing the lawn, the suit means that a face stamp is taken and kept silent on the matter, and there is no practical way to get off the camera that isn’t yours.
That objection is not new, and Amazon’s behavior suggests it expected legal exposure. The company said Faces Faces is not available in Illinois or Texas, two US states with strict biometric privacy laws.
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Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act requires written consent before a company can capture someone’s facial geometry and allows for damages of $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per count, a structure that has made it the most expensive law in the country to pass.
Keeping the feature out of those two study regions is, for critics, less of a caution than an answer to a question no one should have asked out loud.
The Sigwalt appeal sits in a long line of Ring issues. The agency has been mulling its facial recognition ambitions for years, as well as its plans to share data with police and a 2023 deal with the US Federal Trade Commission on employee access to customer video.
Amazon, which bought Ring for nearly $1bn in 2018, has traditionally positioned cameras as neighborhood safety tools. Plaintiffs position them as a privately owned surveillance network targeting the road.
What happens next is a process. A court must decide whether the lawsuit proceeds as a class action, and Amazon has not yet filed a response to the specific allegations.
A previous biometric suit against Ring survived a motion to dismiss in 2022, giving the new claim a precedent to lean on, albeit not an outcome. There’s currently a file attached, a calculation of damages, and a feature that keeps snapping faces while lawyers argue over whose consent it needed.
