Jason Bassler | @JasonBassler1
Big Brother just got an upgrade.
Starting December, Amazon’s Ring cameras will scan and recognize faces. Don’t want to be in their database? Too bad — walk past a Ring and your face can be stored, tagged, & analyzed without consent.
One step closer to total surveillance.
[Image: A Ring doorbell camera mounted on a brick wall. A digital overlay shows facial recognition scanning a person's face with grid lines. Text on the right reads “Amazon's Ring Adds Facial Recognition to Home Security” with additional text below.]
6:00 PM | Oct 4, 2025
Source: https://x.com/JasonBassler1/status/1974640686419857516
Yup, cameras, should I set them up, will store locally. I don’t think I want a camera on the lock though.
That article says that I, as a random bypasser, suffer all the disadvantages of Ring but without any of the benefits of owning one. I’m still not getting a ring though.
Yall gonna stop paying companies so you can’t help build the surveillance state? No? Awesome…
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Are you too stupid to look it up your self?
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=ring+face+recognition
By doing that you end up with sources like
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/03/amazon-ring-doorbell-facial-recognition-pricacy/
- https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/ring-cameras-can-now-recognize-faces-and-help-to-find-lost-pets/
Please don’t be that lazy in the future, the knowledge is literally at the tips of your fingers, you just need to reach out.
Maybe we should bring back covid masks as a privacy/fashion statement now?
Sorry, that’s illegal now
876.12 Wearing mask, hood, or other device on public way.—No person or persons over 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood, or device whereby any portion of the face is so hidden, concealed, or covered as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter upon, or be or appear upon any lane, walk, alley, street, road, highway, or other public way in this state.
It’s part of the big campaign to disrupt criminal anarchy, treason, and other crimes against public order
Illegal for you, I guess. I can wear a mask outside. Good luck down there in the US, guys.
I always thought of them as a privacy aid.
This feels like it should be illegal in the EU.
Swede here, our laws disallow private security cameras from filming public areas.
The law is so broad that it interfered with dashcams, disallowing them for years.
Same in Belgium, and Tesla is even having issues with it’s “sentinel” feature being ruled illegal 🙏
I wish we had more protection in the UK. Technically the law allows filming public property as long as it is not the direct focus, eg you film your front door and catch some of the street. But it’s not policed at all. Living on a terraced main road I cant leave my house without being filmed by at least 5 different neighbour’s cameras from a range of different American or Chinese companies. One camera literally just points towards a window of my own home. It’s insane, I feel like they’re all just standing outside watching me.
Technically, I have the right to ask to see the footage they record and ask for adjustments to angles etc, but it’s left to individuals to do. I’d have to have an awkward individual conversation with a bunch of strangers (sad but true) about something I doubt they even consider an issue.
I’d love to see some legislation that would require some publically accessible way to review what’s in camera for doorbell cams, but I guess that would just be seen as helping criminals.
That’s really interesting. Is it specifically security cameras?
Can you generally take videos of people in public places? Photos?
Normal cameras and video cameras are fine, the key point is that the camera should not be fixed for continuous monitoring of public spaces.
Dashcams were a grey area, most are fixed mounted to a car with the capability to continously record so at first only cameras you manually place and trigger when about to drive were permitted, then the law was loosened further, and now I believe they are permitted.
Now here we have an interesting fact about the Swedish court system, you can present any evidence regardless of if it was collected through legal or illegal means, and the court will decide on if they will accept it or not.
The illegal part only comes into play in a separate case where you have to stand trial for whatever illegal act you did.
I found this page explaining that it’s not that it’s illegal (necessarily, keep reading), but that there is a GDPR exemption for private property and if you’re filming areas the public access then you need to comply with GDPR. The page says for dashcams you need to comply with GDPR as well.
This page says it’s generally not allowed to record, but if you read the Swedish version it has a flow chart (that I can’t read 😅).
What most interests me is that it keeps referring to the GDPR as the reason why you can’t record public areas (or your neighbours). I’m not in Europe and don’t know much about the GDPR but why is Sweden special with these rules, why aren’t all countries in the European Union limiting the use of security cameras on public areas?
Can’t speak for other countries, but Sweden’s rules sound similar to Germany’s. You are allowed to monitor your own ground, but not public ground without good reason. Which makes cameras like Ring not explicitly forbidden, but you are not allowed to place them in a way which would monitor the street for example.
And regarding your question in the other comment: in Germany you are allowed to take pictures in public spaces, but you are not allowed to publish them when people are the main focus and identifiable. So you take a picture of Neuschwanstein and some random people are small in the foreground? Not important, so you are free to upload it to your internet blog. But if you film a couple having an argument in front of Neuschwanstein, then you are not allowed to upload it, because the focus is on the couple. You would need to anonymize their faces and voices.
And why is it not all countries? Because they didn’t see it as necessary to have same rules everywhere in EU, probably due to different values, making it hard to getting a compromise. Or that it wasn’t seen as important enough to bother establishing the same rule everywhere.
Before GDPR came, we had PUL, PersonUppgiftsLagen, The Law of Personal Information.
It was stricter than GDPR is now.
Why wasn’t PUL kept? EU-countries can have laws that are stricter than EU laws, they just need to be at least as strict as the corresponding EU law.
It was replaced by GDPR, probably to make it easier to conform to just one set of laws.
EU rules have to exist in order to regulate a certain thing, and even once they exist they don’t apply automatically, each country has to codify and adapt them in their own legal frameworks. There are time limits to do this.
Now here we have an interesting fact about the Swedish court system, you can present any evidence regardless of if it was collected through legal or illegal means, and the court will decide on if they will accept it or not.
The illegal part only comes into play in a separate case where you have to stand trial for whatever illegal act you did.
That’s a good way to handle it.
It is more specific in France, but I actually dug around regulations a year ago when the other homeowners in my building wanted to install a security camera. The common parts of a residential building are considered somewhere in between public and private.
The short version is you need majority approval, the tape can only be accessed if something happens, you can’t film apartments doors or windows and as few people as possible may have access. Which put quite a damper on my neighbours who were already celebrating how they would watch who enters and leaves the building at all times.
Bunch of fucking weirdos.Same in Italy, minus the dashcam part
do public seccurity cameras exist though? In the US, we have cameras watching the movement of cars thru the road network via license plate. It’s dystopian
Yes they do exist, the areas are clearly signed when the cameras are used for surveilence, we also have traffic monitoring cameras to get info of how the traffic flows, they are publicly viewable and fairly low resolution so you can see the traffic flow but can’t really identify a specific license plate.
There are cameras that do do that though, they are put up to automatically bill you for the congestion charge.
I believe this is also illegal in some US States. I know of at least a couple that don’t allow biometric data to be stored without concent; I think Facebook even lost a case in one state and had to pay a pretty large sum of money.
It most certainly is. There’s no way they’re implementing this here.
there’s no way
What. You gonna make em? Once the data’s on their servers, they’ll do what they want.
Unless you physically disallow and destroy their hardware that’s invaded your continent.
Will it happen in Europe too?
This cannot happen in EU with the current GDPR, they would need to request and receive consent prior to collecting the face.
Google nest camera has been doing this for years already though?
Is it sold in EU with the face collection?
I’m losing my mind. Ring cameras everywhere, Flock cameras, ID/face verification, everything Google touches, airports, Tesla car cameras, every modern car actually, Meta glasses, Chat Control every year, the OSA, stores using facial recognition (and other tracking), social media billionaire shenanigans, Samsung installing Israeli spyware and putting ads on the fridges, fuck even the Windows 11+Chrome+iPhone combo I see in public. I could keep going. We could all keep going.
It’s too much. Idk anymore. This post broke me a little.
I am Italian and I have much fewer reasons to feel like you, but I still do and, although loving the friends I made there, I know I will never again set foot in the USA, since this comes from a culture of surveillance dating back more than a century.
I am actually offering temporary accomodation to any of my friends who may want to try his luck in the EU.
The UK has a CCTV facial recognition system that’s quite massive, we’ve resisted such programs for the most part (a few cities have them but they’re not linked together).
So it’s not like Europe is free of this.
Here most of our camera systems are for our own use only, not for the government, with this giant exception.
The UK’s CCTV network has been well known for decades. It is actually nuts.
I have no idea how regulated it is right now within the EU, outside of GDPR, but surely there are different laws locally. I don’t know if after Brexit something has been added to such laws in the UK, but I must say that even before that it was obvious that the UK LOVED their cameras.
A massive nationwide network of facial recognition CCTV doesn’t exist in the UK
Willing to host a small family from the US that absolutely loves your country?
In 52 m2 I can offer a matrimonial bed for a couple visiting to get job interviews for some time, not much more.
I’m rapidly approaching the point where I go completely feral and begin smashing every advertisement and camera I see. Smashing large billboard screens and smearing shit on walls. Just to tear this monstrosity to the ground.
I wouldn’t advise you to smash cameras but it would make you my hero
PREACH WTF SERIOUSLY
Same here. My landlord has security cameras (possibly option activated so they turn on only when people are in the hallways) in all corridors. This means I simply cannot leave my own apartment without being caught on camera, and there are so many cameras in my neighborhood that it is insane. Almost all (if not all) are private, but fuck me…
This isn’t legal where I live. It’s not allowed to record public spaces
Same here. All private cameras that record or process data from a public space need to be announced on entrance of a property. Though now that i think about it, idk how ring got passed that law to begin with in 99% of its use cases…
( if its a front door that can only view private property its fine iirc, and if it has public space like roads its a nono )
idk how ring got passed that law to begin with in 99% of its use cases
It doesn’t comply… but the responsibility falls on the person who mounts/uses the hardware, so Amazon does whatever they want.
Right, so i could in theory start sueing. Nice haha
Same as non-legal ebikes perhaps? Where I live the police don’t seem to care unless the rider happens to be a drug dealer or otherwise wanted by the police.
I’d take a guess that while a ring doorbell might be illegal and not enforced, it probably means the recorded footage might be not accepted in court if ever needed… Perhaps (I’m not a lawyer or even close to being an expert). Unless a doorbell inspector becomes a thing then it probably just slides.
I was gonna say, I’m not sure this would hold up to legal scrutiny, not that that makes it ok in the first place.
Completely legal in the US.
I really don’t think so.
Sorry to hear you feel that way. It can be tough to be confronted with something you’ve always felt was true but turns out to be false.
Your superior thinks otherwise, my boy.
Americans are fucking weird, they piss and moan about speed and red light cameras, and claim they are unconstitutional. However, the Ring shit is good to go.
Ring cameras don’t toss a fine at you for walking past them too quickly.
Also, where are people complaining about red light cameras, so I can avoid taking my bike or car anywhere near there? It’s probably a vocal minority, but I’d prefer to know and cover my ass. Just in case.
Nah Ring cameras will just toss police to your door because you look loosely like a person of interest in a case.
Good think police visiting houses doesn’t lead to the death of innocent people on the regular.
So just people can’t perceive longer term costs. Damn the government can decrease this backlash so much by just billing from their liability insurance directly instead of sending the fine to the person.
All of Ontario apparently
they even have speed cameras now, any slightly above the speed limit of a street will imediately give a warning, and fine if it occurs multiple times. you can easily accidentally go over like 5 miles above in an empty street.
Hell if your car is old bitch like mine you may run into the problem of your speedometer being very minutely off. It’s nothing massive just a mile or two off, but my 01 Tacoma doesn’t have cruise control so I can’t be cautious that way so it can be problematic.
so use GPS to double-check your speed?
I’m not pissing about with GPS speed over a 2 MPH difference that is only a problem going down hill in 25 zone. 90 percent of the time it is wholly irrelevant since I drive a 24 year old 4 cylinder truck.
So you drive over the permitted speed limit put in place to protect pedestrians on “an empty street”. And you’re complaining about getting multiple warnings before getting fined for ignoring the safe speed limit? You ‘accidentally’ went over the speed limit multiple times on the same street, but the rules shouldn’t apply to you I guess, your highness.
Luckily I live somewhere where they will have to hide it
Ran into this one Halloween a few years ago. Fuckers had Halloween decorations out, seeming welcoming, and when my kid went up to the door they used their ring camera to make fun of him. Once society falls in the next year or two, that’s where I’m going first.
For legal reasons, he jusut told me in PM that he will go there to get more candy. He will take ALL their candy and EAT it in front of the ring camera.
We need to normalize spray painting the lenses on these things, as well as painting “big brother” on doorways of those that own them. If you enable fascism, you should expect some minor vandalism.
You could start by sending them a letter that informs them of this occuring and how it impacts the world around them before you skip straight to vandalism. I’m sure a lot of people just never considered the extent of that data that is being shared so much as they figured only they would have access to the footage.
Ugh… Idiots ruin everything. How can people not understand this? Just so fucking ignorant
Sure, but then you’re a suspect.
You can send a letter without a return address. I plan on taking this idea and sending it out to my neighbors who have one. It honestly seems like a fun side activity.
Just go from the side and toss a Molotov at their door.
Everyone is so obsessed with surveillance. My uncle has a Ring and even if I told him about this, he wouldn’t care; he wants to know who walks past his house. Now the cops will know whether he lied to them because they can subpoena Ring for their records. People are literally giving away their rights for the convenience of not answering the fucking door
The depressing part is that even if you don’t own or use Ring, you will be in their database because those cameras are everywhere. The populace has completely given up all their privacy and have done it willingly.
Not only willingly, they’ve fucking paid for it.
The depressing part is local self hosted alternatives exist like Ubiquiti unifi, all their cameras store locally to a hard drive on your property with all local processing.
So what happens to images of your face when they’re stored? Who tf really knows. We do know these oligarchs will literally try to exploit and profit from literally anything and everything they get access to.
Some countries that aren’t treated like a state run corporation are actually letting citizens copyright their own faces for their protection.
Uploaded to a database. Linked to your meta data full of wrong think. Face blown off by a AI built and operated kamakazi drone.
Sucks to be anyone that looks like you, but that is a price the 1% are willing to pay for complete control. Because what’s left after you own all the wealth and assets?
probably to use your face in AI image generation of a person.
I don’t know if it is the same brand, but my morning walks are cheered on by an increasing chorus/wave of “hello, you are currently being recorded”. Weird dystopian vibes.
That’s so creepy!
Great, my downstairs neighbor has one of these things that everyone has to walk by when going in or out of the main building. Why she needs one in an apartment building with a locked main door that you have to unlock yourself for guests is a mystery to me.
Simple - Because she doesn’t trust the strangers living in the building any more than the strangers on the outside. I don’t blame her one bit. In my lifetime, I’ve seen countless stories of women being raped and/or murdered by other tenants and the complex 's own security.
In the olden days, before electricity, I used to be friendly with a neighbor, and she became convinced that someone was sneaking into her apartment when she was at work, and stealing her underwear and prescription meds. She took a day off because she was under the weather, and one of the maintenance guys, who was always overly-friendly, unlocked her door, and walked right in.
It turned out that he’d been warned about this before, and he was fired. But if she, or other neighbors, had Ring cameras, they would have caught on to him immediately.
A camera inside her apartment would have the same results without invading the privacy of every other tenant in the building.
In that specific case, but most people want to identify people BEFORE they enter their promises. I’m not opening my door to any cops, for instance, unless they can slide a warrant under the door.
You are missing the point entirely. There are about a million reasonable reasons someone would want to have a doorbell camera, and they have every right to them. The owner of the camera isn’t violating your privacy, AMAZON is doing that by collecting the data from a privately-owned source who hasn’t given permission to hijack data from their device.
Don’t be mad at the tenant for protecting their safety, be mad at Amazon for exploiting that reasonable fear, encouraging people to get Ring cameras, and then stealing the data they collect.
Is it too much to ask for a doorbell camera to operate like a doorbell? We’ve had peepholes on doors that can be opened and checked when needed for years with no problem, why do we suddenly need constant surveillance of the public commons? This is also on the owner for buying into the scare tactics.
IMO it should be flat out illegal to have any permanent camera that monitors a public space. I don’t consent to have a stalker track when I enter and leave my home, I won’t consent to have a neighbor do the same.
This isn’t the 20th century. We get a LOT more deliveries these days, and a lot of them are expensive small electronics, like phones. They sit there on our front step all day , while we are at work, tempting porch pirates.
About the only thing keeping those jackals from stealing EVERYTHING, is the fact that they know there are cameras on the house, and also most of the houses surrounding the target. That scares off all but the most desperate thieves.
Peep holes are the most basic security precaution, but they are severely limited. They are distorted, and can be easily beaten by ducking. You may look out and see one guy, while three more are below the peep hole. They don’t record, so there is no evidence to identify troublemakers later. They can’t be accessed remotely, so you can’t see who is messing with your house while you’re out.
To extend your logic, we shouldn’t use cars, because bicycles did the job just fine. Or phones, because we could just yell to our neighbors. Or stoves, because open fires cook food good enough. Or computers, because writing on paper always worked fine. For that matter, why use ballpoint pens, when a quill pen always worked good enough.
Why bother to improve?
Lacking a secure drop off point is a service issue between you and the company delivering the package. It’s just as possible to install a lock box or a set a pickup point or require a signed delivery. Complain to Amazon if they’re too cheap to do anything about porch piracy. The convenience of opening your door for a package doesn’t stand up to my right to privacy.
For the rest of your points: sure, if you really need a camera to watch your private porch then feel free to aim it at the porch and not the entire street. I’m not saying it should be illegal to monitor your property but that your right to 24/7 monitoring ends where your property line does.
They already have porch lock boxes that deliver very guys seldom use. Amazon also has drop off boxes at local businesses.
Once again, the problem isn’t with the person who is justifiably concerned about their safety. The problem is Amazon collecting data without permission. Keep your focus on the actual problem, instead of attacking your fellow citizens.
Exactly. Why the fuck is it on at all times?
There are also a million ways to achieve the same goals without agreeing to be Amazon’s snitch for your entire building. Amazon isn’t stealing the data. The ring camera owner sold everyone out.
Also, just so we’re clear, the maintenance worker still had access to her apartment and could have just lied about the reasons. It would not have stopped him in any meaningful way.
“But she would have known who it was!” … yeah, AFTER he was inside her apartment. It doesn’t even do the one thing you’re claiming it would be useful for.
Yeah, except if he knew everyone that entered the apartment at any time was recorded, it would maybe have been a deterrent.
Her other option could be a hidden nanny cam trained on the door so she’d have proof she wasn’t crazy.
But again the issue isn’t people wanting to know who is outside their door, or entering without their knowledge. The issue is the camera companies keeping all the footage for themselves.
We have an off brand camera aimed at our porch for porch pirates. It’s not going to get someone walking by on the street. We have it only recording to the sdcard.
But we can live view and it alerts through the app. We don’t use the cloud service or AI. But there’s nothing stopping the app from screenshotting alerts and sending them somewhere.
I’m trying to figure out how to have an actual closed system so only computers under my control can access camera(s)
In the olden days, before electricity, I used to …
Are you like 200 years old?
Getting there.
My partner is in his 40s and they didn’t have electricity until they moved to the mainland for middle school. There are still large parts of the world that don’t have electricity.
Fair enough. My downstairs neighbor can get a doorbell cam that records locally then.
Why did a maintenance guy have access to her home?
Maintenance in apartment complexes always have access to any apartment, in case of fire, overflowing bathtubs, inspections, deaths, smoke detector battery replacement, etc. They are supposed to give 24 hours notice, but the point is that a nefarious character could gain access to any apartment in the complex, if they don’t keep their master keys secure.
We had a case recently of a murder in a gated complex. A maintenance guy got obsessed by the 19 year old daughter of a resident, and eventually kidnapped, raped, and murdered her. All because he had access to the master keys. They ended up passing some law under her name. I think they have to do a better job of clearing their criminal backgrounds, which would have caught this guy. It seems like keeping the master keys under better security should be a major thing, too.
That’s nuts.
Like, the landlord/maintenance people here do have a master key, but it doesn’t work unless the flat is locked from the outside and set in a particular position. If you lock it from the inside, or don’t put it in the special position, they can’t access the flat.
There are inside devices that could stop someone with a master key, like chain locks, but you have to be in the apartment. Once you leave, you obviously can’t set the chain, and anyone with a master key, or is a good lock picker, can get in.
I’ve never heard of setting the bolt a certain way, except maybe in hotels. Even then, it only works if someone is physically in the room.
This is how my door works. You lift the handle to engage the bolts in the doorframe (otherwise the lock doesn’t even turn), then you can turn it either a full rotation, and pull it out, or turn it a full rotation and then about 45 degrees further. If the slit points downwards only people with proper keys can access. If you turn it slightly more, so it’s at an angle, then it’s in “service mode” and people with service keys can also access it.
You can’t put it in service mode from the inside.
If it’s fully locked and you want access for some reason, you’ll have to call for a locksmith. Alternatively remove the entire doorframe from the wall. It’s reinforced though so that’s going to be a hassle. The door itself is some kind of thick metal. Great soundproofing.
