Amazon Ring was sued June 2 over its Familiar Faces feature, which uses AI facial recognition to identify regular visitors to a home — including people who walked past the camera without ever agreeing to be scanned.
What Familiar Faces does
Ring announced Familiar Faces in September 2025 and launched it in December. The feature lets Ring owners train their camera to recognize people who regularly appear at their home — a family member, a mail carrier, a neighbor — and deliver specific notifications ("Dad is at the door") rather than generic ones ("A person is at the door").
Ring users opt in. The people who pass by their cameras do not.
The lawsuit
The class action was filed in Seattle by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt. The complaint alleges that "millions of other Americans passed by a Ring security camera and unknowingly had their facial recognition information collected."
Amazon says face data is encrypted and never shared, and that unidentified faces are automatically deleted after 30 days. The company did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Ring's history on privacy
This isn't Ring's first privacy problem:
2023: Amazon settled with the FTC and paid a $5.8 million fine after allegations that staff and contractors had improperly accessed private customer videos — including footage from women's homes. The FTC found that every employee had full access to every customer video regardless of need.
2024: Ring revoked a policy that had allowed police to request customer footage without a warrant.
2026: Ring launched Search Party, an AI feature using Ring footage to find lost pets, drawing immediate backlash. Days later, Ring canceled a partnership with surveillance company Flock Safety — which had reportedly shared footage with ICE and other federal agencies.
The common thread
The Familiar Faces lawsuit raises the same issue as the Disneyland facial recognition case from two weeks ago: who bears the burden of consent? In both cases, the people being scanned — not the people who chose the technology — are the ones with no say in it.
Up next · Wednesday
An overview of DeleteMe — how the data broker removal service works, what each plan covers, and how it's priced.