Amazon was sued on Monday over alleged privacy violations from its Ring doorbell cameras. The class action lawsuit, filed in Seattle by Virginia resident Charles Sigwalt, claims that Ring’s Familiar Faces feature stores images of passersby without consent.

Ring announced the Familiar Faces feature last September and faced pushback from consumer protection organizations like the EFF, as well as Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). But the company moved forward with its plans to launch the feature in December.

Familiar Faces lets Ring users identify people who regularly come to their home through AI facial recognition. That way, if a regular guest, like a family member, mail carrier, or neighbor, comes to the door, the device will be able to recognize them and deliver more specific notifications like “Dad is at the door,” rather than “A person is at the door.” Ring users have to opt in to this feature, but privacy advocates noted that the people who walk past these Ring doorbells have not consented to these facial-recognition scans. That same concern is at the center of this class action lawsuit.

According to the lawsuit, “Millions of other Americans passed by a Ring ​security camera and unknowingly had their facial recognition information collected.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. At the time the feature was released, the company stated that face data is encrypted and never shared; unidentified faces are automatically removed after 30 days.

Amazon’s Ring has a record of concerning behaviors regarding user privacy. In 2023, Amazon settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and paid a $5.8 million fine over allegations that the company’s staff and contractors had improperly accessed private videos from women customers; the FTC’s complaint said that every employee had full access to every customer video, even if the worker had no need to access that footage. Ring has also maintained relationships with law enforcement and once granted police the ability to request Ring footage from users without a warrant.

After airing a Super Bowl ad to introduce Search Party, an AI-powered feature that uses Ring footage to find lost pets, the company faced similar backlash. Days later, Ring canceled its plans to partner with video surveillance company Flock Safety, which has reportedly given footage to ICE and other federal agencies. When Ring founder Jamie Siminoff spoke with TechCrunch after Ring canceled its arrangement with Flock Safety, he indicated that the deal would’ve created too much of a “workload.”

mazon was sued on Monday over the facial-recognition feature it recently added to its Ring doorbells, in a complaint that turns on a familiar asymmetry: the person who buys the camera consents to it, and the person walking past the camera does not.

Charles Sigwalt, a Virginia resident, filed the proposed class action in federal court in Seattle, alleging that Ring’s “Familiar Faces” feature captures and stores images of passersby without their permission. He is seeking at least $5m in damages on behalf of the class, according to Reuters.

Familiar Faces is an optional setting that uses AI to recognise people a camera has seen before, so that a notification can say who is at the door rather than simply that someone is. Ring rolled it out late last year as part of a broader AI refresh of its cameras, with users able to label recognised people and the system cataloguing a set number of faces over time.

For the homeowner who switches it on, that is the convenience. For the delivery driver, the neighbour, or the stranger cutting across the lawn, the suit argues, it means having a faceprint taken and retained with no say in the matter, and no practical way to opt out of a camera they do not own.

That objection is not new, and Amazon’s own conduct suggests it anticipated the legal exposure. The company has said Familiar Faces is not available in Illinois or Texas, the two US states with the strictest biometric-privacy laws.

Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act requires written consent before a company captures someone’s face geometry and allows damages of $1,000 for each negligent violation and $5,000 for each intentional one, a structure that has made it the most expensive law in the country to fall foul of.

Keeping the feature out of those two states reads, to critics, less like caution than like an answer to a question nobody had to ask out loud.

The Sigwalt complaint sits in a longer line of trouble for Ring. The unit has drawn scrutiny for its facial-recognition ambitions for years, as well as for its data-sharing arrangements with police and a 2023 settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over employee access to customers’ video.

Amazon, which bought Ring for about $1bn in 2018, has tended to frame the cameras as neighbourhood safety tools. The plaintiffs frame them as a privately owned surveillance network that happens to point at the street.

What happens next is procedural. The court has to decide whether the case proceeds as a class action, and Amazon has not yet filed a response to the specific allegations.

An earlier biometric suit against Ring survived a motion to dismiss in 2022, which gives the new claim a precedent to lean on, though not a result. For now there is a filing, a damages figure, and a feature that keeps scanning faces while the lawyers argue over whose consent it needed.