Amazon Teams Up With Law Enforcement to Deploy New Face Recognition Technology

Matt Cagle, writing for the ACLU:

The company has developed a powerful and dangerous new facial recognition system and is actively helping governments deploy it. Amazon calls the service “Rekognition.”

Marketing materials and documents obtained by ACLU affiliates in three states reveal a product that can be readily used to violate civil liberties and civil rights. Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.

Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance.

This strikes me as a bad idea in general, but an especially bad idea for a company that sells consumer devices with built-in cameras.

★ Tuesday, 22 May 2018