Documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California have shed new light on Rekognition, Amazon’s little-known facial recognition project. Rekognition is currently used by police in Orlando and Oregon’s Washington County, often using nondisclosure agreements to avoid public disclosure. The result is a powerful real-time facial recognition system that can tap into police body cameras and municipal surveillance systems.

According to further reporting by The Washington Post, the Washington County Sheriff pays between $6 and $12 a month for access to Rekognition, which allows the department to scan mug shot photos against real-time footage.

The most significant concerns are raised by the Orlando project, which is capable of running real-time facial recognition on a network of cameras throughout the city. The project was described by Rekognition project director Ranju Das at a recent AWS conference in Seoul.

AWS AI/MLサービス AI/MLサービス活用の扉 はじめに：AI/MLは遠い存在ではありません AI（人工知能）やML（機械学習）と聞くと、どこか遠い未来の技術のように感じられるかもしれません。しかし、実は私たちの身近なところで既に活用されています。スマートフォンの音声アシスタントや、ECサイトの商品レコメンド機能などがその良い例です。 株式会社…

De FBI wil met de Rekognition-AI van Amazon gaan proberen om bepaalde online content te herkennen. De tool moet specifiek gebruikt worden om ‘naaktheid, wapens en explosieven’ in afbeeldingen en video’s te identificeren, schrijft het ministerie van Justitie, en zal binnen de overheid Project Tyr gaan heten. Een datum is nog niet genoemd, ook is niks bekend over gebruik bij gezichtsherkenning.…

Facial recognition technology is still misidentifying people at an alarming rate – even as it’s being used by police departments to make arrests. In fact, Paul Bischoff, consumer privacy expert with Comparitech, found that Amazon’s face recognition platform incorrectly misidentified more than 100 photos of US and UK lawmakers as criminals.

Rekognition, Amazon’s cloud-based facial recognition platform that was first launched in 2016, has been sold and used by a number of United States government agencies, including ICE and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities. In comparing photos of a total of 1,959 US and UK lawmakers to subjects in an arrest database, Bischoff found that Rekognition misidentified an average of 32 members of Congress. That’s four more than a similar experiment conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – two years ago. Bischoff also found that the platform was racially biased, misidentifying non-white people at a higher rate than white people.

These findings have disturbing real-life implications. Last week, the ACLU shed light on Detroit citizen Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested after a facial recognition system falsely matched his photo with security footage of a shoplifter.

The incident sparked lawmakers last week to propose legislation that would indefinitely ban the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement nationwide. Though Amazon previously had sold its technology to police departments, the tech giant recently placed a law enforcement moratorium on facial recognition (Microsoft and IBM did the same). But Bischoff says society still has a ways to go in figuring out how to correctly utilize facial recognition in a way that complies with privacy, consent and data security.

Congressman calls out Amazon’s ‘performative’ facial-recognition moratorium

Sometimes, you just have to call BS.

That appears to be the thinking of California Congressman Jimmy Gomez, who on June 17 shared a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding specifics on his company’s supposed year-long moratorium on providing its facial-recognition tools to police. Because when it comes to Amazon’s big June 10 announcement, sadly there is no there there. 

Lest we…