On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported on how online retail monolith Amazon has been “essentially giving away facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies.” This was revealed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, that showed deals between law enforcement and Amazon for their proprietary “Rekognition” surveillance technology. The ACLU and numerous other civil rights groups signed onto a letter demanding Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos cease selling off this technology to law enforcement agencies.
Amazon touts itself as a customer-centric company and directs its leadership to “work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.” In the past, Amazon has opposed secret government surveillance. And you have personally supported First Amendment freedoms and spoken out against the discriminatory Muslim Ban. But Amazon’s Rekognition product runs counter to these values. As advertised, Rekognition is a powerful surveillance system readily available to violate rights and target communities of color.
Amazon states that Rekognition can identify people in real-time by instantaneously searching databases containing tens of millions of faces. Amazon offers a “person tracking” feature that it says “makes investigation and monitoring of individuals easy and accurate” for “surveillance applications.” Amazon says Rekognition can be used to identify “all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports”—at a time when Americans are joining public protests at unprecedented levels.
Amazon has no answer for that.
Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsey did not directly address the concerns of civil rights groups. “Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services,” she said, referring to Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud software division that houses the facial recognition program. “When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use our services.”
She said that the technology has many useful purposes, including finding abducted people. Amusement parks have used it to locate lost children. During the royal wedding this past weekend, clients used Rekognition to identify wedding attendees, she said. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)
In completely unrelated news, earlier this month The Guardian reported on South Wales’ police using facial recognition technology to identify potential criminals during the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff.
As 170,000 people arrived in the Welsh capital for the football match between Real Madrid and Juventus, 2,470 potential matches were identified.
However, according to data on the force’s website, 92% (2,297) of those were found to be “false positives”.
But think about the 167,703 people who weren’t harassed at all! Get used to this spokesperson language from law enforcement agencies in America.
“Successful convictions so far include six years in prison for robbery and four-and-a-half years imprisonment for burglary. The technology has also helped identify vulnerable people in times of crisis.
“Technical issues are common to all face recognition systems, which means false positives will be an issue as the technology develops. Since initial deployments during the European Champions League final in June 2017, the accuracy of the system used by South Wales police has continued to improve.”
The reason we have civil rights groups and civil liberties groups is because our law enforcement agencies have a terrible and ongoing history of racism, sexism, and bigotry. Our unjust system will not be fixed by giving a systemically racist organization more tools with which to apply their biases.