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
My face is in all the databases, sadly.
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 their luck in the EU.
Can’t we make necklaces of intense IR radiation that block out our faces? Or does that not work anymore?
Pray this isn’t legal in the UK, under GDPR i don’t think so but I’m not sure
Pretty sure this will be illegal in Illinois too
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.
I went to my sister’s house yesterday, she lived in a gated community and to visit i have to let them take a picture of my face and then scan the cam for access. i thought that’s extremely obnoxious. This is far worst.
Yeah, no. I’d be inviting my sister to visit me instead.
Yeah this has to be super inconvenient for the residents. I imagine many delivery services, DoorDash, instacart, will refuse to do this bullshit. Forcing the resident to meet them at the gate, or just not receive service at all. I would be pressuring my HOA to end this policy.
Not in US, but all those non-perishable deliveries will leave their stuff at the main gate guardhouse. Not sure about food though.
You think people doing door dash deliveries actually care about that? The average person that also uses an iPhone probably has been ok with face unlock for years.
In my workplace they rolled out the face unlock for Windows laptops some time ago. I see many many people making use of that. And I don’t care if in some cases the claim is being made (right or wrong whatever) that images don’t leave the device. The average person won’t think there is a difference to it.
I’ve had uber drivers cancel on me because they don’t want to enter a gate code. Because it’s inconvenient, could be error prone, and slows them down (I would assume.) So it might not always be privacy concerns but also inconvenience.
Don’t conflate opt-in local facial recognition with mandatory cloud facial recognition, especially when it’s being sold to cops. It’s a bad take and weakens your credibility.
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.
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?
