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Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're talking about Amazon's ring cameras that are rolling out a new, slightly controversial AI powered facial recognition feature to all of their video doorbells. We're going to get into the options if you want to opt out of this, why people are, you know, thinking this is going to be a useful feature, why Amazon's ring says it's a useful feature, and why some people think this is an evasion of privacy because it doesn't just recognize your face, it recognizes stranger faces. So we're going to get into all of that on the show today. Before we do, I wanted to mention if you want to get access to all of the AI models that we talk about on the show, there's over 40 of the top AI models on my own platform, which is called AI Box AI. We have a playground that lets you chat with all of the top models from OpenAI to Anthropic to Google to Gemini to Claude, and a whole bunch of really cool image models and audio models from 11 labs. You could talk with all of them for 19amonth all in one platform. You can, you can switch between them, test which one has the best responses, compare them side by side. It's an awesome platform for 20amonth, so you don't have to have subscriptions to 40 different platforms. If you want to go check it out, it is AI Box AI. I'll leave a link in the description. All right, so Amazon's new ring doorbells is going to be able to identify any visitors that come to your front door through a new AI powered facial recognition feature. This is kind of controversial. They're calling this new feature Familiar Faces, and it was announced earlier in September, but they're final rolling it out to anyone in the United States. Amazon says that this is going to let you identify people that you know come to your house very regularly. They're going to let you catalog up to 50 faces. They kind of have a max at 50. And these could be your family members, your friends, your neighbors, delivery drivers, you know, household staff, and anyone else. And after you label someone in the ring apps, you actually have to go in and label someone. Basically when people come, it'll have some sort of screenshot of their face that'll show up inside of the app and you can put a label and a name to that person's face. But after you do that, then the ring camera is going to recognize them as they come up to your door in the future. So instead of having, you know, an alert that pops up on your phone that says, you know a person is at your door, you're going to get a personalized notification and you can, you can customize the notifications a little bit more where it'd be something like mom is at the front door, or you know, your, your wife is at the front door or your kid or whoever. Right. So it'll tell you exactly who is at the front door. I think this is good in some sense. I mean, it's kind of annoying to have 100 a person is at your front door all day long. Notific, especially from people that are just like your family, maybe like, you know, your, your spouse or your kids that visit the house all day long because it's your house. You don't want to get notified every single time necessarily. So you could turn on notifications for each of them. So on the one hand, you can imagine this as being a, you know, somewhat useful, I mean, albeit slightly useful feature, but it is receiving some pushback. They have the consumer protection organization EFF and a US Senator that are pushing back on it. And Amazon Ring Own can use this feature to essentially help them disable all the alerts that they didn't want to see coming in. So, you know, you don't have to get notifications referencing yourself coming in and out of your house, which I think is one that a lot of people would love to turn off. And you can also set these alerts on a per face basis. So just for specific people, you could be alerted or not alerted. So in any case, like, yes, this sounds sort of useful. I will mention to Amazon's credit, it's not enabled by default. You're going to have to go and turn it on in the app's settings. But what I will say is that while faces can be named in the app directly, you can do that in the event history section or from the new Familiar Faces library. Once you label the face, you know it's going to be named in all of the notifications and in the app's timeline and in the event history. So these labels you can then edit at any time. They also have a bunch of tools to merge duplicates or delete faces. So, like, this is a fairly well thought out feature. They have a bunch of, you know, capabilities go and edit everything. And Amazon says that the face data is encrypted. They say that they will never share with other people. They also say that, you know, unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days. So, like, yes, this is sort of useful, but a lot of people are concerned about some privacy of having this facial recognition, basically looking at every single person that comes to your house. And especially when you think of how many Ring cameras there are around, you know, across America, how many, you know, facial recognition scans are going to be run. So one of the big areas that some people have raised concerns is just the company's history of having partnerships with law enforcement. And they, I think they even once gave police and fire departments the ability to request data from the Ring Neighborhoods app. Now it's so tricky because, like, on the one hand, yes, this is kind of, this is very useful for the police, right? You could imagine if there is some sort of burglary on one house, you'd want to be able to request the Ring data from all the houses around you. But on the other hand, it's tricky because, you know, this is typically something you need like a warrant for. And there's all sorts of gray areas.
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There is this thing called the Ring Neighbors app. And the police were able to essentially request from Amazon directly from, you know, getting footage directly from people's doorbells. And the thing that I think people don't like about this or what some people push back on is, you know, it feels sort of like, well, this is my doorbell, this is my camera I set up. And, and having, you know, a police, for example, instead of knocking on my door and asking me if they could see my footage to go straight to Amazon and like, get footage off of something that feels like mine, which is primarily recording myself. I think some people just don't like that. More recently, Amazon partnered with Flock, which is the maker of an AI powered surveillance camera used by police. And Ring's own security efforts, I think, haven't always been perfect in the past. I know, for example, Amazon and Alexa have had some kerfuffles in the past where they'd accidentally like, you can request your data from an Amazon Alexa, for example, what it records on you. And I remember hearing the story of, I mean, it was obviously an anecdote, but someone said that they requested their, their data from Amazon's Alexa. They were given a bunch of audio files that the Amazon Alexa had recorded of them and it turned out to be like their neighbor or like some other person that wasn't them. And so you know, they just like gave some random person, some other random person's audio files which had, you know, include them singing in the shower among other. So I think that was a major red flag and definitely feels like if the wires can get crossed there, having a camera at your front door could be not super great. So Ring had to pay a $5.8 million fine back in 2023 after the federal, US Federal Trade Commission found that Ring employees and contractors had broad and like basically unrestricted access to customers video for years on their neighbor's app. There was, you know, also users home addresses and precise locations that were being exposed, which was a big issue. Also Ring passwords have been floating around the dark web for quite a long time, which is obviously another issue. And so I think given Amazon's history on a lot of this stuff, adding in this facial recognition that can now identify people and you know, there's a possibility of that data being leaked, I think a lot of people are concerned. So with all of that I will mention that you are able to, you know, you are by default opted out of this. You don't have to enable it if you do have a Ring camera. So I think right, right off the bat that's probably the biggest thing. But because of all the privacy concerns that are coming, there is a call from a US Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts to abandon the feature. I don't think that they are going to because I can see, you know, when there's like a genuine use case that's not illegal, I think they'll roll it out and let people use it on a, you know, on a basis of who wants it. Then there's of course the EFF that is also giving them some backlog backlash to Consumer Protection Organization. There are some privacy laws that are preventing Amazon from launching it in Illinois, Texas, Portland and Oregon. Which is interesting, right? You have red states and blue states. It seems pretty, pretty, you know, nonpartisan of an issue. People don't typically want a camera with facial recognition tracking everyone that comes in and out of the homes all around them. I, I will say like in my opinion people should be allowed to use this if they want it and people that don't want to should be allowed to not use it. So yeah, I don't technically, I don't typically love it when like whole states disallow things. But hey, if you are like a super privacy person, then you can move to one of those four states. I think there's a bunch of questions that were asked and in response to all of those Amazon said that users biometric data is going to be processed in the cloud and they claim that it is not going to be used to train AI models. It also claims it won't be able to identify all of the locations where a person had been detected. So basically like it's not going to geo. It's not going to add a geolocation to the facial recognition data. Which is kind of interesting because they also have a feature called Search party which like looks across the whole neighborhood network of ring cameras to find lost dogs and cats. And technically you could have that same feature just on facial recognition, but I guess they're going to try to turn that off so it's not, you know, tagging geolocation of faces. It'll be interesting to see how this rolls out in the future. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you learned anything new or if you appreciated the show, please leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcast. It really helps out the show to be found by more amazing people like yourself. It's I think it's the number one way that Apple ranks shows is by how many reviews new reviews are in. So if you wouldn't mind leaving a rating review, it would really help the show out a ton. Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. As always, make sure to try out AI box AI.