Amazon's facial recognition technology is already one of the most scariest things in tech, and now it has managed to make it a little more scarier.?
Reuters
Amazon's controversial facial recognition technology dubbed 'Rekognition', can now spot fear. It already had the ability to track emotions like Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Surprise, Disgust, Confusion and Calm, and now it can accurately recognise Fear.
Amazon has also revealed that with the recent updates to Rekognition, now it is capable of recognising age more accurately.
Amazon has stated in the past that its Rekognition software is capable of tracking and analysing hundreds of people in an image using a database with tens of millions of faces.?
Recently, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California obtained documents about a Rekognition which was being used by police in Orlando and Oregon's Washington County. What's worse was that, they've been delivered under a non-disclosure agreement so the information wouldn't be made available to the public.
The AI system taps into feeds from police body cameras and municipal surveillance systems, scanning faces versus previously captured mugshots. According to The Washington Post, the county Sheriff's office is paying between $6 and $12 a month for access to Rekognition. The project in Orlando is even more concerning however, given that it's now running facial recognition in real time across its network of city cameras.
Reuters
ACLU has already raised serious concerns about the rights of the public. They feel that the real-time facial recognition system would only intensify the already negatively biased treatment minority communities receive from police. "People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government," the group said in a statement.
ACLU teamed up with other civil rights organisations and wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO, asking him to stop offering facial recognition services to law enforcement and government agencies. In July, the Orlando Police Department officially ended its Amazon Rekognition program, after temporarily suspending it mid-June, after the letter by ACLU.