Ring Doorbells Can Now Identify Faces

Source: How To Geek, Jorge A. Aguilar
Photo: A ring pro camera in the rain on the side (Ring)

Ring has started rolling out its AI-powered facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces, to video doorbell owners across the United States. This addition means your smart doorbell can now identify your visitors, a major step forward for personalization that also brings significant privacy concerns.

The new feature, which was announced back in September, is designed to identify people who regularly approach the Ring camera. This lets you build a catalog of up to 50 faces, including those of family members, friends, delivery drivers, or just regular visitors. Instead of a generic motion alert, you’ll get a specific notification identifying who is there, such as ‘Mom at Front Door.’

This level of detail is clearly intended to cut down on notification fatigue. Ring says users can set these alerts on a per-face basis, which is great if you want to disable notifications entirely when you or your kids are coming and going multiple times a day. However, you’re handing the app a labeled list of your associates, which is a massive privacy trade-off.

If you’re worried about data security, tagging visitors with their legal names is risky. It’s safer to keep the Familiar Faces feature disabled entirely. Not every home security feature needs this level of AI integration, especially when that integration requires giving a corporation access to your biometric data.

If you’d like to use it, you’ll need to turn the feature on in the app settings, since it isn’t enabled by default. You can label and manage faces directly from the Event History section or the new Familiar Faces library, making it pretty straightforward to get started. Once labeled, that name appears in all notifications, the app timeline, and the Event History.

This feature is arriving alongside Ring’s newest hardware lineup, including the Wired Doorbell Pro and the Spotlight Cam Pro. These new devices feature what Ring calls Retinal 4K Vision. This uses AI tuning to optimize the video, offering features like 10x zoom and improved low-light performance. The company has also introduced Retinal 2K Vision on devices like the Indoor Cam Plus.

Familiar Faces is not the only new AI tool Ring is introducing. Amazon also recently released Alexa+ Greetings, which turns Alexa into a digital doorman that handles deliveries and sends away solicitors for you. Another new feature is Search Party for dogs, which uses AI to scan nearby outdoor Ring cameras when a neighbor reports a lost dog, scanning for potential matches to help locate lost pets.

While the prospect of personalized alerts and sharper video sounds great, the addition of facial recognition raises serious questions that we shouldn’t ignore. Consumer protection organizations like the EFF have already pushed back against Familiar Faces. In fact, privacy laws have prevented Amazon from launching this feature in certain areas, including Illinois, Texas, and Portland, Oregon.

Amazon claims face data is encrypted and that it never shares the data with others. The company also claims that any unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days and that the data isn’t used to train its AI models.

https://www.howtogeek.com/ring-doorbells-can-now-identify-faces