Amazon sued over Ring facial recognition feature

Amazon has just been hit with a class-action lawsuit over its controversial facial recognition feature in Ring video doorbell cameras.

The lawsuit was filed on Monday in Seattle by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt. The suit seeks $5 million in damages.

Last fall, Amazon launched a new "Familiar Faces" feature inside Ring doorbells. Utilizing AI, Familiar Faces scans and identifies visitors to a Ring owner's home. When Familiar Faces recognizes a regular visitor — whether it's a family member, mailman, or delivery driver — Ring can tell users who is at their door instead of providing a generic notification.

Familiar Faces is completely optional to use, and Ring owners can turn the feature off if they want. However, as the lawsuit points out, visitors to a Ring doorbell owner's home can't consent before their face is scanned.

"Millions of other Americans passed by a Ring ​security camera and unknowingly had their facial recognition information collected," reads the lawsuit.

Ring has long faced criticism from privacy advocates. In fact, when the Familiar Faces feature was announced in September, it too faced swift blowback from advocacy groups like the EFF, who said that it violated state privacy laws.

"Many biometric privacy laws across the country are clear: Companies need your affirmative consent before running face recognition on you," said an EFF report at the time. The EFF report also pointed out that the Ring feature was unavailable in certain states due to biometric privacy laws.

U.S. Senator Ed Markey also warned about the issues with Familiar Faces in a letter demanding Amazon cancel the rollout of the feature last year.

"This announcement represents a dramatic expansion of surveillance technology, creating vast new privacy and civil liberties risks," Senator Market wrote. "Americans should not have to fear being tracked and recorded while visiting a friend’s home or walking past a neighbor’s house. Amazon should reconsider this decision and abandon its plans to deploy FRT [Facial Recognition Technology]  into its Ring doorbells."

Just earlier this year, Ring faced controversy when it announced in a Super Bowl ad that it would launch a new feature called Search Party in partnership with Flock. This feature would utilize a network of Ring devices in a neighborhood to find a lost pet. Users quickly criticized the idea due to privacy and surveillance concerns, and the partnership between the two companies was cancelled. Leaked emails later uncovered that Ring executives discussed how this feature could be used to track people, too.

Amazon also previously reached a more than $5 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it found that employees had access to view and download customers' Ring camera data.