Ring cameras in your neighborhood might be invading your privacy every time you take the dog out for a walk.
In the latest lawsuit against Amazon over privacy concerns, Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt alleges that the company illegally violates the privacy of millions of Americans who unknowingly have their likeness captured and stored by Ring cameras without their consent. The class action complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, where Amazon’s Seattle headquarters is located.
The lawsuit specifically concerns a new feature for Ring devices, introduced in December, known as Familiar Faces. That feature was designed to scan and identify faces that the camera sees regularly so the device owner can receive personalized alerts if someone familiar shows up at the door. The feature can store up to 50 faces and “learns to recognize friends, family, and frequent visitors over time,” according to Amazon’s marketing materials.
The lawsuit, which seeks well over $5 million in damages, states that the people surveilled by Ring doorbell cameras did not consent to allow their facial recognition data to be collected and stored.
“Familiar Faces uses facial recognition technology to scan the face of all guests and passersby before categorizing who they are using artificial intelligence,” the lawsuit explains. “AI then collects a ‘face print’ of the respective person and translates it into a unique patchwork of numbers that allows Ring to re-identify who that person is each time Familiar Faces deploys facial recognition on them.”
The class action suit will hinge on whether Amazon’s Ring facial recognition practices break the law in states that don’t explicitly restrict facial recognition technology. Amazon notably declined to deploy the Familiar Faces feature in places with robust anti-surveillance laws protecting residents against facial recognition tech, including the state of Illinois and Portland, Oregon.
To establish that the Ring feature runs afoul of national law, the lawsuit cites the FTC’s existing policy on biometric surveillance, which describes the “serious risk of harm” that facial recognition collection can pose. “Such harms are not reasonably avoidable by consumers if the collection and use of such information is not clearly and conspicuously disclosed. … For instance, if businesses automatically and surreptitiously collect consumers’ biometric information as they enter or move through a store, the consumers have no ability to avoid the collection or use of that information,” the FTC policy states.
Surveillance at your door
It’s no surprise that Ring’s Familiar Faces feature is a privacy nightmare. When the feature was first announced last year, it faced a backlash from privacy-minded lawmakers and organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which warned that Amazon was poised to violate state laws protecting biometric data. While Amazon positions the new Ring feature as a way to quickly spot visiting friends or family, the deeper issue is how many other people will be swept up in the surveillance process.
In a piece outlining legal concerns around the feature, the EFF observed that by design, Ring cameras using the feature will collect facial recognition data on “many people who have not consented to a face scan, including friends and family, political canvassers, postal workers, delivery drivers, children selling cookies, or maybe even some people passing on the sidewalk.”
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey called on Amazon to abandon the Familiar Faces feature after it was announced. “This announcement represents a dramatic expansion of surveillance technology, creating vast new privacy and civil liberties risks,” Markey said in a letter to Amazon’s CEO in late October. “Americans should not have to fear being tracked and recorded while visiting a friend’s home or walking past a neighbor’s house.” Markey sits on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which exercises oversight—and regulatory power—over data privacy issues.
“Defendant’s conduct here represents a profound privacy failure for millions of people who are now being tracked by Amazon—which has a contentious relationship with and tempestuous history regarding consumer privacy rights,” the lawsuit states.