5 Uncomfortable Truths About Using Ring Cameras

5 Uncomfortable Truths About Using Ring Cameras

The Ring Video Doorbell, originally released in 2014 and later rebranded as Amazon Ring, was designed to be a simple way to connect your front doorbell to your smartphone, allowing you to see who’s at the door or catch deliveries. Over a decade later, Ring has become a dominant force in the video doorbell market, bolstered by Amazon’s backing. However, this rapid growth has brought significant concerns about Ring’s footage-recording and face-recognition features, both for users and their neighbors.

Ring has faced numerous controversies since its inception, with consistent complaints and criticisms about endangering the privacy of users and anyone caught on camera. While Ring cameras offer perks like smartphone integration, security services, and the ability to catch potential burglars, these benefits come with major tradeoffs. Before investing in a Ring Doorbell, it’s crucial to consider these uncomfortable truths carefully.

Using a Ring Camera Automatically Enrolls You in Neighbors

A key feature of the Ring Video Doorbell is Neighbors, a community message board for Ring users in the same area. Through Neighbors, users can share video footage, snapshots, and text posts about neighborhood activities captured by their Ring cameras. The platform is designed to facilitate information sharing in emergencies, such as missing pets or children, or dangerous situations like fires.

The concerning part is that Neighbors’ integration is not optional. The moment you activate your Ring video doorbell, you are automatically enrolled in the Neighbors service, meaning your neighbors can receive updates about whatever your camera captures in their activity feeds if you choose to share. While this can be disabled manually in your Ring settings, not everyone wants to be part of a community when they’re simply installing a video doorbell, especially if they don’t regularly communicate with their neighbors.

Ring Has Integrated Biometrics

One of Ring’s advanced features is Familiar Faces, an AI-powered facial recognition system that allows your camera to gradually recognize the faces of frequent visitors. When a familiar visitor, such as a friend or family member, is recognized by your Ring camera, you receive a notification on your paired smartphone that they’re at the door—and their name, if you choose to register it.

However, to enable this feature, everyone who visits your home is automatically subjected to biometric scanning processes, which not everyone is comfortable with. While you need to opt into Familiar Faces to use it, visitors have no choice, raising ethical concerns. Additionally, this biometric data can be stored by Amazon for up to 180 days from when it’s initially gathered, with the only silver lining being that Amazon has stated it does not use this data to train its algorithms.

As with any AI-powered system, Familiar Faces is fallible. There have been incidents where AI-powered cameras have incorrectly identified individuals, leading to wrongful accusations and incarcerations.

Police Can Solicit Footage from Ring Users

In addition to general privacy concerns about Amazon storing usage and biometric data from Ring cameras, grievances have arisen with law enforcement integrations added to Ring’s systems. In 2025, Amazon partnered with law enforcement technology company Axon to add Community Request to the Ring setup, a feature that allows law enforcement agencies to send requests to users in a Neighbors group for video footage to aid in ongoing investigations.

There are two major concerns about this feature. Firstly, police soliciting footage in this manner could violate U.S. citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, as searching private property typically requires a formal warrant. Police can bypass proper procedure and get footage directly from nearby users’ cameras. Secondly, soliciting footage directly from users could play into unconscious biases and lead investigations astray. Not everyone in a neighborhood is on the same page, and one neighbor who dislikes another could send the police footage of them, claiming they’re suspicious and potentially endangering their safety and privacy.

Ring Cameras Can Be Hacked

Like any device that connects to the internet, Ring cameras are vulnerable to hacking by malicious actors. In fact, Ring cameras only received end-to-end encryption in 2022. While they have become more difficult to penetrate since then, it’s still not impossible. If a hacker can connect to your network with a stolen password, logging into your Ring system would be quite simple, allowing them to steal recorded video and monitor your camera feed.

While this is less a concern with Ring cameras specifically and more about Wi-Fi-connected cameras in general, it’s still a factor worth considering before integrating a Ring camera into your smart home setup. Given the biometric data registered by the Familiar Faces feature, it’s definitely not the kind of device you want falling into the hands of a bad actor.

New Functions Can Be Added to Ring Cameras, Whether You Like It or Not

Amazon is constantly developing new features and forming partnerships for Ring hardware and software, some of which users may not find appealing. One prominent example was Amazon’s partnership with Flock Safety, a security tech company that makes and sells its own security cameras. These cameras are equipped with proprietary recognition software that can identify license plate numbers tied to known criminals or pinpoint the location of nearby gunshot noises.

In October 2025, Flock Safety announced that its partnership with Amazon would bring these same functions to Ring cameras, integrating them with the existing Community Request feature to supply information to law enforcement. However, in February 2026, the Ring-Flock Safety partnership was ultimately canceled, with Amazon claiming the process would’ve taken more time and resources than initially anticipated. Coincidentally, this announcement came after Amazon faced severe backlash to an ad aired during Super Bowl LX, followed by some users returning their Ring cameras, though the company neither confirmed nor denied whether this backlash was a contributing factor.

Even though the partnership with Flock was canceled, the underlying issue remains: it is solely at Amazon’s discretion what kinds of features are added to Ring cameras and their associated apps in future updates, as well as whether you can opt out.

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