Dystopian or useful? Amazon’s Ring doorbells will now be able to identify your visitors through a new AI-powered facial-recognition feature, the company said on Tuesday. The controversial feature, dubbed “Familiar Faces,” was announced earlier this September and is now rolling out to Ring device owners in the United States.
Amazon says the feature lets you identify the people who regularly come to your door by creating a catalog of up to 50 faces. These could include family members, friends and neighbors, delivery drivers, household staff, and others. After you label someone in the Ring app, the device will recognize them as they approach the Ring’s camera.
Then, instead of alerting you that “a person is at your door,” you’ll receive a personalized notification, like “Mom at Front Door,” the company explains in its launch announcement.
The feature has already received pushback from consumer protection organizations, like the EFF, and a U.S. senator.
Amazon Ring owners can use the feature to help them disable alerts they don’t want to see — like those notifications referencing their own comings and goings, for instance, the company says. And they can set these alerts on a per-face basis.
The feature is not enabled by default. Instead, users will need to turn it on in their app’s settings.
Meanwhile, faces can be named in the app directly from the Event History section or from the new Familiar Faces library. Once labeled, the face will be named in all notifications, in the app’s timeline, and in the Event History. These labels can be edited at any time, and there are tools to merge duplicates or delete faces.
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Amazon claims the face data is encrypted and never shared with others. Plus, it says unnamed faces are automatically removed after 30 days.
Image Credits:Ring
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