Millions of people could be affected by this lawsuit against Amazon’s Ring cameras

Ring cameras in your neighborhood might be invading your privacy every time you take the dog out for a walk. In the latest lawsuit against Amazon over privacy concerns, Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt alleges that the company illegally violates the privacy of millions of Americans who unknowingly have their likeness captured and stored by Ring cameras without their consent. The class action complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, where Amazon’s Seattle headquarters is located. The lawsuit specifically concerns a new feature for Ring devices, introduced in December, known as Familiar Faces. That feature was designed to scan and identify faces that the camera sees regularly so the device owner can receive personalized alerts if someone familiar shows up at the door. The feature can store up to 50 faces and “learns to recognize friends, family, and frequent visitors over time,” according to Amazon’s marketing materials. The lawsuit, which seeks well over $5 million in damages, states that the people surveilled by Ring doorbell cameras did not consent to allow their facial recognition data to be collected and stored. “Familiar Faces uses facial recognition technology to scan the face of all guests and passersby before categorizing who they are using artificial intelligence,” the lawsuit explains. “AI then collects a ‘face print’ of the respective person and translates it into a unique patchwork of numbers that allows Ring to re-identify who that person is each time Familiar Faces deploys facial recognition on them.” The class action suit will hinge on if Amazon’s Ring facial recognition practices break the law in states that don’t explicitly restrict facial recognition technology. Amazon notably declined to deploy the Familiar Faces feature in places with robust anti-surveillance laws protecting residents against facial recognition tech, including the state of Illinois and Portland, Oregon. To establish that the Ring feat