Amazon’s AI facial recognition for police draws ire of ACLU

Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc. drew the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over a facial-recognition system offered to law-enforcement agencies that the advocacy group says can be used to violate civil rights.
In marketing materials obtained by the group, Amazon Web Services said its Rekognition system uses artificial intelligence to quickly identify people in photos and videos,
enabling law enforcement to track individuals.
“Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns,” the group said in a statement. “Today, the ACLU and a coalition of civil rights organisations demanded that Amazon stop allowing governments to use Rekognition.”
Law enforcement agencies in Florida and Oregon are using the service for surveillance, according to the ACLU. The group used public-records requests to learn about the service.
Government use of facial-recognition software has raised concerns among civil rights groups that maintain it can be used to quiet dissent and
target groups such as undocumented immigrants and black rights activists.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Department just outside Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, thinks the software is a great deal. The department pays Amazon between $6 and $12 a month to quickly cross-reference security camera footage and other images with 300,000 jail-booking photos to help identify suspects in criminal investigations, Deputy Jeff Talbot said. The software isn’t used for real-time or mass surveillance, he said.
“We absolutely find $6 to $12 to be a smart investment in our community’s safety,” Talbot said. “The response from our constituents has been positive. They’re glad we’re staying on the cutting edge of technology.”
Some AI software that’s used for facial recognition has been shown to be racially biased because it was trained using images with relatively few minorities included. In an infamous example from 2015, Google’s AI-powered photo-tagging system classified some black people as gorillas.
In a paper published this year, researchers at MIT and Microsoft Corp. found that facial-recognition systems are far less accurate at identifying non-white people and women than white men.
Amazon maintains law enforcement is just one application of the technology, which can also be used to find abducted people, and by amusement parks to track down lost children. The internet giant also noted that the recent British royal wedding used Rekognition to identify attendees. “When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use our services,” Amazon said.