For some reason the friendly faces option will not work. Every time I try to set it up, it immediately jumps to “not available in my state”. It must have the state incorrect, as facial recognition is not restricted in my state. How do I correct this so I can optimize my service?
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Wyze added a bunch more states to their block list that aren’t listed in their public warning. My state is one of those that they don’t list in the warning but which they blocked even though the laws don’t actually forbid face detection in the state. Wyze seems to be taking any laws that are not absolutely clear that everyone is allowed to use face detection and blocking the entire state. This may include states that only restrict certain businesses from storing biometric data and just block everyone because someone might use a Wyze cam in their small business and allow facial recognition. Easier just to ban everyone, including residential users for which it would be allowed.
It sucks, but it’s happening to me too, even though my state isn’t in the list, and my state allows residential users to use it. I also thought it was a mistake, and got an employee to look into it and they confirmed my state is blocked now too. That’s very likely what’s happening to you as well even if it is legal for you as a residential user to have it. They’re in their paranoid era.
If you tell me what state(s) you have cameras in, I can try asking an employee if your state is included (you may private message me if you don’t want to post it in this thread). Or even better, you can create a ticket with Support and ask them if your state is on the new unpublished block list. They won’t tell you WHY your state is blocked, but I bet we could find the applicable laws for your state and figure it out pretty quick. Just look up any laws about face detection or biometric data, and if it restricts it at all for consumer or business, including requiring permission or notification in any way, that seems to be what causes a state to get blocked. Because some people could in theory use it incorrectly, Wyze won’t allow it for anyone in that area…they’re afraid of liability.
I’m confident yours is something similar.
Step 1 is verifying whether you’re in a state on the new banned list.
If you’re not in one of those states, then we can try to figure out why you’re blocked. Maybe you have a shared camera from someone who’s in a banned location. They won’t say how they determine what state someone is in, but I can tell you it is not based on the IP address (at least not alone), and it doesn’t seem to be based on the current location of my phone (at least not the only thing they check). I wouldn’t be surprised if they take multiple data points. Could include billing address on the account, could be something logged when the camera is setup. They could use GPS, or Bluetooth beacon location triangulation or SSID triangulation, or a number of different things. Most people “share” location permissions to set up their cams with Bluetooth or WiFi, etc and they could log the location at that time based on demonstrated fairly accurate location techniques on any one of those things alone, let alone multiple of them. It could be a combination of all those things. But I don’t think they’ll make an exception. I think we’re just out of luck.
Your best option if you need face detection is either a different company that is less controlling and lets you decide whether you’re within the legal limits or not, or get an RTSP converter and run your own Face detection software (this is basically the route I decided to take), but Wyze doesn’t seem willing to bend on this, and I’m not very happy with them for it, but it’s not a deal breaker for me since I have a workaround.
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That is incredibly frustrating! I am in Louisiana, but moved from Illinois. I know Illinois is strict about it, but Louisiana shouldn’t be. I updated my address on the website and the application, and it won’t take it, or Louisiana is also blocked😩
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Let me ask someone about it. Maybe it locked on to Illinois since you used to be there. We’ll see if there is a way to reset the block.
That would be great, since I definitely want to use what I pay for.
My state apparently disallows “Friendly Faces”. But surprisingly, I can turn it on the floodlight V1 camera. Not on floodlight V2 and pro. I haven’t checked lately if it’s really working. It used to, until Wyze removed it in the past.
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Yeah, it kind of depends on the camera model and the app version.
I can actually turn Friendly faces on for some older cameras in the settings if I want to, but I still can’t access the Control panel in the account tab to assign faces to different profiles or make corrections.
The newer cameras block access in the settings too.
You can access the Friendly Faces control panel in the Account tab if you side-load the App v2.5 onto your phone, but you won’t be allowed to simultaneously use the App v3 unless you edit the package name to allow you to run them side by side like I did to be able to use the v3 app and the v2.5 app simultaneously. However, since the newer cams aren’t supported in the v2.5 app and the v3 app blocks the new cameras in the settings, I don’t use Face detection through Wyze anymore. Having the newer cameras is more important to me than having face detection. I just have my camera feeds run through Home Assistant add-ons instead.
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