Amazon was hit with a class action lawsuit on Monday over its Ring doorbell cameras' "Familiar Faces" feature, which uses AI to identify people who regularly visit a user's home. The suit, filed in Seattle federal court by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt, alleges that Ring's facial recognition system captures and stores images of passersby without their knowledge or permission. "Millions of other Americans passed by a Ring security camera and unknowingly had their facial recognition information collected," the complaint states. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The Familiar Faces feature, which Amazon announced in September 2025 and rolled out in December despite opposition from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), allows Ring owners to tag regular visitors like family members, mail carriers, and neighbors. Once tagged, the system can send tailored alerts such as "Dad is at the door" instead of generic motion notifications. While the feature is opt-in for Ring users, privacy advocates have argued from the start that neighbors and strangers walking past these doorbells never agreed to be scanned — a concern that now forms the backbone of the lawsuit. Amazon has said that facial data is encrypted, never shared with third parties, and that images of unidentified people are automatically purged after 30 days.
The lawsuit lands against a backdrop of mounting legal and regulatory trouble for Ring. In 2023, Amazon settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $5.8 million after the agency accused Ring employees and contractors of improperly accessing private video recordings, particularly those of women customers. The FTC complaint alleged that virtually every Ring employee had unrestricted access to all customer footage, regardless of whether they had a legitimate work reason to view it. Separately, Ring has drawn criticism for its longstanding relationships with law enforcement — at one point allowing police to request user footage without a warrant.
The case comes as Amazon has been pushing to expand Ring's reach through new AI-powered features. Earlier this year, the company aired a Super Bowl advertisement promoting "Search Party," a tool that leverages Ring's network of doorbell cameras to help locate lost pets. That rollout, too, has raised questions among privacy advocates about how much biometric and video data Amazon is willing to aggregate — and what safeguards exist for the millions of people captured in Ring footage who never signed up for the service in the first place.