Amazon declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted by Ars today.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote in November that Ring’s Familiar Faces will scan “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.” The EFF said Amazon seems to be “try[ing] to unload some consent requirements onto individual camera owners themselves” with messages reminding customers to comply with applicable laws.
“But Amazon—as a company itself collecting, processing, and storing this biometric data—could have its own consent obligations under numerous laws,” the EFF said, urging regulators to “investigate, protect people’s privacy, and test the strength of their laws.”
US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has urged Amazon to discontinue the Familiar Faces feature. Markey sent Amazon a letter in October 2025 asking how Familiar Faces works, and summarized Amazon’s responses in a February 2026 letter that repeated his call to end Familiar Faces.
Markey said that Amazon revealed in its response to his first letter “that Ring’s privacy protections apply only to device owners who may ‘opt in’ to the Familiar Faces feature, while providing no comparable consent mechanism for individuals unknowingly subjected to facial recognition, leaving members of the public with no right to consent to a facial scan and no control over their biometric data.”
According to Markey’s follow-up letter, Amazon also revealed that “individuals seeking deletion of their biometric data [must] request removal from each individual Ring device owner, forcing people to make separate deletion requests for every home they visit,” and “that the number of law enforcement agencies on its Neighbors Public Safety Service has grown from 2,161 in 2022 to 2,723 today.”
Amazon last year introduced an AI-powered “Search Party” feature advertised as being useful for finding lost pets, which led to backlash after a Super Bowl ad. Amazon subsequently ended a deal with Flock Safety that would have sent Ring customer videos to Flock, which is used by police departments.
Ring posed privacy risks before the Familiar Faces and Search Party features were launched. In 2023, the FTC filed a lawsuit accusing Ring of invading users’ privacy by “allowing thousands of employees and contractors to watch video recordings of customers’ private spaces.” Amazon did not admit any wrongdoing but agreed in a settlement to pay $5.8 million for customer refunds, delete certain types of data, and implement privacy and security controls.
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