Tuesday, May 22, 2018

"ACLU asks Amazon to stop selling facial recognition tech to local governments" (AMZN)

Let's hope that, at minimum, it works better than this from a couple weeks ago:
UK police say 92% false positive facial recognition is no big deal
About which the Cardiff force said:
South Wales Police: "No facial recognition system is 100% accurate under all conditions."
From GeekWire:
Concerned about the use of facial recognition technology to detect and identify Americans walking down the street, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Tuesday asking the company to place limits on how its Amazon Rekognition image-detection technology can be used by law enforcement.
The letter, which was signed by several other civil rights organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Seattle Japanese American Citizens League, highlights work Amazon Web Services has done with police departments in Orlando, Fla., and suburban Portland’s Washington County, Ore. Amazon Rekognition is a image-recognition service first introduced by AWS in 2016 and enhanced to handle video recognition last year at AWS re:Invent 2017.

AWS has not exactly tried to hide its work with Washington County, publishing a case study last year describing how Rekognition is used to identify “persons of interest” in the county. In one example, Washington County used Rekognition to identify a shoplifter by uploading a photo of him from the store’s checkout line to a dataset of mugshots from people arrested in the county dating back to 2001, tracking down the suspect on Facebook after the department got four image results with greater than 80 percent similarity.

“Amazon Rekognition has become a powerful tool for identifying suspects for my agency,” wrote Chris Adzmia, senior information systems analyst for Washington County, in the case study.
That’s pretty much exactly what the ACLU is worried about, especially given the ease at which anyone can be potentially identified as a “suspect” in this day and age....
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