Amazon Ring's Familiar Faces is a textbook example for ECD — That Privacy Guy!

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AuthorAlexander Hanff

Prompt<br>a Ring video doorbell mounted on the porch wall of a modern home at dusk, the camera lens glowing as a watchful eye scanning a stranger approaching the door, holographic faceprint mesh lines projected from the camera upward and arcing across the sky into a distant industrial datacentre of towering server racks with cooling stacks venting smoke against a sodium twilight, editorial illustration, dark moody cinematic palette of deep navy charcoal and ember orange, surveillance and environmental cost themes, wide letterbox composition, soft volumetric lighting, painterly digital art

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I am going to make two arguments in this piece, and I want to be clear at the outset that they are independent of each other. Either one, on its own, is a serious problem for Amazon. Together they describe a company that made the worst available choice on both the privacy axis and the environmental axis, for a feature nobody asked their neighbours' permission to point at them.

The feature is Ring "Familiar Faces". Amazon began rolling it out to the United States and Canada in December 2025, with the usual reassurances: optional, off by default, the customer is in control [1]. What Amazon did not lead with - what you have to read the engineering and the legal correspondence to establish - is that the facial recognition runs in Amazon's cloud, not on the doorbell, even though the doorbell is carrying silicon perfectly capable of doing it locally. That single architectural decision is the spine of both arguments below. It is the reason the GDPR exposure is as wide as it is, and it is the reason the carbon argument exists at all.

So let me take the two arguments in order. First, what Familiar Faces actually does, and why it is a data protection problem of a kind the household-activity defence does not reach. Second, what it costs the atmosphere to run biometric matching in a datacentre that did not need to happen in a datacentre; and why that puts it in the conceptual territory the Environmental Crimes Directive was written to address.

What Familiar Faces actually does

When the feature is enabled on an eligible Ring device, the camera scans the face of every person who comes into view, converts that face into a mathematical template - a faceprint - and compares it against a catalogue of up to 50 people the device owner has tagged in the Ring app [2]. If there is a match, the owner gets a notification that says "Emma at Front Door" instead of "person detected". If there is no match, the system still generated and compared a faceprint to find that out.

Read that sequence again. To decide whether an approaching person is one of the 50 tagged faces, the system has to biometrically process the face of every single person who approaches - the tagged neighbour, the un-tagged neighbour, the delivery driver, the canvasser, the kid selling biscuits, the meter reader, and whoever happened to walk past on the public pavement within range. The 50-person catalogue is the owner's. The biometric processing is performed on everyone.

That processing does not happen on the doorbell. Ring's own support documentation states that the facial recognition information is encrypted and stored in the cloud, not on the Ring devices [3]. The class action filed against Ring in the United States this month pleads the same thing: Familiar Faces converts facial images into faceprints that are stored in Amazon's cloud rather than on the device [4]. And in Amazon's written answers to a US Senator, which I will come to, Amazon confirms the biometric data is processed in the cloud [5].

So the picture is: the camera captures the face, the image (or a derived representation) travels to AWS, AWS generates the faceprint, AWS does the match against the catalogue, AWS sends the answer back. The biometric template of a non-consenting passer-by is created and held on Amazon infrastructure.

The hardware could have done this on the device. Amazon chose not to.

Ring's higher-end devices run Ambarella CVflow system-on-chip silicon. The Ring Doorbell Pro 2 is documented as...