Tell Google: Keep Facial Recognition Out of My Doorbell!
Did you know that your friend’s Google Nest camera doorbell might be storing your facial data?
Google Nest’s “familiar face detection” feature allows people to save your name with your picture to a facial recognition database so that their camera can recognize you whenever you come over, without your knowledge or consent. Anyone who walks by a Google doorbell can be tagged—which means your face may very well be stored in a random neighbor’s “familiar face detection” as a contact. On top of enabling invasive spying on neighbors, this tech puts your unchangeable biometric data at risk of abuse and theft in mass databases––databases you have no idea you’ve been added to in the first place.
Tell Google you refuse to add your friends and family to a facial recognition database – and the company must discontinue this feature immediately.
Background: Why is Google letting neighbors secretly store my biometric data?
Not only do facial recognition-enabled Google Nest doorbells allow for spying on neighbors and even total strangers––they also create a huge threat to the privacy and safety of our biometric data. While the most recent models of Google Nest store data on-device, thousands of older models send facial recognition data to the cloud, where companies have consistently failed to protect people’s data from hackers and identity thieves. In other words, Google’s ‘familiar faces detection’ allows your neighbors, friends, and family to put you at risk of having your most personal data sold or stolen, and you have absolutely no idea it’s happening.
On top of that, Google Nest isn’t even end-to-end encrypted, meaning all your data isn’t being protected with the highest level of security that competitor brands are using—and it means Google can access your data.
That’s scary because Google could sell the data to third parties or hand it over to law enforcement without telling you. Using facial recognition technology in home devices creates a rich trove of information that could be taken advantage of by law enforcement.
Google Nest hasn’t even shown it can be trusted with the most basic transparency or privacy practices. For example, Google mysteriously failed to inform users of Google Nest doorbells’ internal microphones. Even worse, some Google Nest doorbells had failures with what should be their most default feature––factory reset––resulting in scary instances where old owners of a Google Nest device have had access to the footage of a new owner.
Let’s be clear: our years of mobilizing against surveillance doorbells is the reason why other popular doorbell camera companies have held off on rolling out facial recognition, even after patenting the tech. Google’s dangerous move to introduce this new surveillance feature is a slap in the face to privacy advocates and privacy-minded customers.
Let Google know that its failure to protect the privacy of users of Google devices is unacceptable, and dangerous surveillance technology like facial recognition simply shouldn’t be a feature of these devices.