Amazon Is Secretly Selling US Police Departments A Real-Time Face Detection System. No Kidding.

We¡¯ve covered lately how facial recognition has become popular among Chinese law enforcement, and more recently even in schools.

Now, it something even scarier is happening, as it seems Amazon has a facial recognition system of its own that it¡¯s selling to US police departments.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Northern California recently obtained documents about a little-known Amazon project called Rekognition. It¡¯s a facial recognition system that¡¯s currently in use by police in Orlando and Oregon¡¯s Washington County. Most importantly, 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.

The system¡¯s capabilities were explained by Rekognition project director Ranju Das at a recent conference in Seoul. ¡°This is an immediate response use case,¡± he said. ¡°There are cameras all over the city. Authorized cameras are streaming the data to Kinesis video stream¡­. We analyze that data in real time and search against the collection of faces that they have. Maybe they want to know if the mayor of the city is in a place, or there are persons of interest they want to track.¡±

For ACLU, that raises some serious concerns about the rights of the public. They believe the real-time facial recognition system would only exacerbate 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.

As such, the group has already joined with other civil rights organisations to demand Amazon cease to offer facial recognition services to law enforcement and government agencies. ¡°Amazon should not be in the business of providing surveillance systems like Rekognition to the government,¡± they wrote in an open letter to company CEO Jeff Bezos.