ACLU demands that Amazon stop selling facial-recognition software
SAN FRANCISCO – Two years ago, Amazon built a facial- and image-recognition product that allows customers to cheaply and quickly search a database of images and look for matches. One of the groups it targeted as potential users of this service was law enforcement.
At least two signed on: the Washington County Sheriff ’s Office outside of Portland, Ore., and the Orlando Police Department in Florida.
Now, the ACLU and civil rights groups are demanding Amazon stop selling the software tool, called Rekognition, to the government because it could be used to unfairly target protesters, immigrants and regular Americans just going about their daily business.
“Amazon should be protecting customers and communities; it should not be in the business of powering dangerous surveillance,” said Matt Cagle, an ACLU attorney.
The Amazon software works by comparing images provided by the customer to a database of images the customer has also provided. It searches for a match using the computing power of Amazon’s cloud computing network AWS.
The recognition is broader than just humans: It can also be used to search for items such as chairs or cars. But it’s quite good at people, too.
For example, during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Sky News created a database of royals and celebrities and then compared it with photos of the people entering St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle to attend the ceremony. Using Rekognition, Sky News was able to quickly identify who was in the images, allowing it to run their names as subtitles on the screen as they walked into the church.
The software is also being used by Pinterest to match images, by stores to track people, to identify potentially unsafe or inappropriate content online and to find text in images.
In its description page of the service, Amazon says the software can quickly and accurately search and identify a person in a photo or video and track people even when faces are not visible.
It can also detect, analyze and index up to 100 faces in a single image, allow- ing the user to “accurately capture demographics and analyze sentiments for all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports and department stores,” according to a blog post on Amazon’s website from 2017.
Another Amazon post said the program could allow users “to easily ... review hours of video footage to search for persons of interest, track their movement and detect their activities.”
It’s the concept of facial recognition in conjunction with law enforcement that worries some civil rights groups. In a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sent Tuesday, 34 groups said people should be “free to walk down the street without being watched by the government. Facial recognition in American communities threatens this freedom.”
They fear the real-time face recognition could allow police or government groups to watch crowds and pick out activists or the undocumented.
“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments. This product poses a grave threat to communities, including people of color and immigrants, and to the trust and respect Amazon has worked to build,” the letter states.
Amazon disagreed. In a statement, it said it requires that its customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services. Outlawing new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology could only worsen our quality of life, Amazon said.