Blaze News readers spotted this problem from a mile away when we covered Ring’s creepy AI-powered surveillance features earlier this year. Ring should have seen it coming too, given the company’s penchant for spying on everything within viewing distance of its nearest camera — at least that’s what this new class-action lawsuit alleges. According to the suit, Amazon Ring is collecting and storing photos of passersby without their consent, and if the court finds for the plaintiff, the company will pay up to the tune of $5 million.
The lawsuit
In the class-action lawsuit filed by a Virginia man, Ring is charged with violating the privacy of millions of Americans through AI-powered facial recognition and analysis features included in many of its cameras embedded in video doorbells, mounted outdoors, and even placed inside homes.
The sad truth of the modern world is that mass surveillance is nothing new.
The suit specifically goes after Ring’s Familiar Faces feature, which is designed to detect the faces of “friends, family, and frequent visitors over time.” Once a familiar face is identified, Ring owners receive a notification that tells them which person is at the door.
In order to pull off this trick, Ring cameras allegedly must scan the faces of everyone who walks by and compare them with the facial images saved in its system. This includes friends and family members as well as complete strangers who have no idea that the camera mounted nearby is analyzing their likeness with AI. Just like that, a feature built for user personalization is now a potential tool for creating AI-generated profiles of vast numbers of unwitting Americans who did not agree to participate in Ring’s alleged public surveillance operation.
Even more problems for Ring
The lawsuit doesn’t even take into account Ring’s known spy-like feature called Search Party. Billed as a helpful tool to find lost pets, Search Party taps into a vast network of Ring cameras in a specific area to scan for lost dogs, cats, and other critters, identify them, and help owners bring them back home.
The concern here is that finding lost pets is merely the tip of the iceberg. If Ring’s surveillance dragnet can find animals, it can also scan for people, subverting privacy and crossing ethical boundaries. Even worse, a leaked email from Ring founder Jamie Siminoff admitted that mass surveillance was the true purpose of Search Party all along, concealed under the guise of stopping crime in neighborhoods.
According to Siminoff, Ring doesn’t use captured footage without users’ consent, stressing that “sharing has always been the camera owner’s choice.” This is only half true. While Familiar Faces is locked behind a manual setup process that requires users to opt in, Search Party is enabled on supported cameras by default; you must disable it manually in the Ring app to limit Ring’s spying capabilities.
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Unfortunately, if the allegations are true, the anonymous people who walk in front of Ring cameras with Familiar Faces or Search Party enabled don’t get a choice in the matter, and images of these people are recorded, stored, and analyzed directly on Ring’s servers, often without their knowledge. Absent opt-in or opt-out options for these pedestrians, we come to the crux of the lawsuit.
Today’s spyware could be even more dangerous with AI
The sad truth of the modern world is that mass surveillance is nothing new. CCTV, which was first deployed in Nazi Germany to watch V-2 rocket launches from a safe distance during World War II, became a mainstay of American public security by the 1980s. Past is prologue. Fast-forward 40 years, and the powers that be have found an array of creative ways to spy on us — warrantless FISA investigations, smart TVs, smart glasses, and the list goes on.
Throughout these privacy violations, mass surveillance captured plenty of footage, but it used to take time and effort for real people to pore through it all and give it meaning. Today, AI can do all the image analyzing for governments, corporations, and bad actors in record time, allowing underground organizations to identify and monitor Americans so efficiently that it would make Communist China blush. The facade of privacy and online anonymity in America is effectively gone.
Thankfully, we still have some rights in this country, and one way we hold offenders accountable and test claims for truth is through our legal system. The class-action lawsuit against Ring was filed in June, and now the two parties have the option to settle or go to trial. While we wait, you can read the complete lawsuit here.
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