Amazon-owned Ring began rolling out its Familiar Faces facial-recognition feature in the United States on December 9, 2025. Ring says the feature lets customers with eligible cameras receive alerts naming people they have labeled in the Ring app.
The launch follows objections from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and U.S. Senator Ed Markey over biometric privacy and surveillance, particularly the scanning of people who have not consented to facial recognition.
First announced in September, Familiar Faces requires a Ring Premium subscription and an eligible 2K or 4K camera, Ring says. Customers will receive an in-app notification when it becomes available. The company says the feature is unavailable in Illinois, Texas, and Portland, Oregon.
According to Ring, customers can create a directory of up to 50 people. Once a person is labeled, their name can appear in notifications, the app’s timeline and Event History when the camera recognizes them. Customers can set alerts for individual people, including turning off notifications about their own movements.
The feature is off by default and must be enabled in the app’s settings. Users can name faces through Event History or the Familiar Faces library, edit labels, merge duplicate profiles and delete entries.
Biometric data and consent concerns
Ring says face data is encrypted, stays private to the customer’s account and is never shared with anyone else. Its launch announcement says unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days. In written responses to EFF before the rollout, Amazon said biometric data was processed and stored in the cloud and that it was not then using the data for model training.
EFF argued in a November analysis that matching visitors against saved profiles requires scanning the faces of people who have not agreed to facial recognition, including delivery workers and passersby. The organization said this could violate state biometric privacy laws and called for regulators to investigate.
Ring’s launch announcement advises customers to check local laws that may require consent before enabling the feature. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, had urged Amazon to abandon Familiar Faces and sent the company questions about its plans.
EFF staff attorney F. Mario Trujillo said: “Knocking on a door, or even just walking in front of it, shouldn’t require abandoning your privacy.”
Amazon told EFF it lacked the technical capability to provide law enforcement with a list of all cameras that had identified a particular person. EFF nevertheless warned that recognition tools could be repurposed for broader tracking, pointing to Ring’s separate Search Party feature for locating lost dogs through participating neighborhood cameras. That comparison does not establish that Familiar Faces can currently track people across accounts.
Law-enforcement ties and security history
EFF also cited Ring’s relationships with law enforcement. Ring had recently announced an expansion of Community Requests to public safety agencies using Flock Safety’s Nova platform or FlockOS. Ring says customers choose whether to respond to footage requests and that agencies cannot see who received a notification or declined to participate.
Ring was required to pay $5.8 million in a 2023 Federal Trade Commission case concerning employees’ and contractors’ broad access to customer videos.
A flaw disclosed in January 2021 in Ring’s Neighbors app exposed precise locations and home addresses associated with posts. Ring said it had fixed the issue and found no evidence that the information had been accessed or used maliciously.
Separately, Ring account credentials were exposed online in December 2019. How those credentials had been obtained was unknown, and Ring denied a data breach.
