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Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos talks to the media while touring the new Amazon Spheres during the grand opening at Amazon's Seattle headquarters in Seattle, Washington, U.S. Photo: Reuters

Amazon sells facial recognition to law enforcement – civil rights groups protest

A coalition of civil rights groups called on the US e-commerce giant to stop selling the program to law enforcement because it could help surveillance of vulnerable communities

Technology

Amazon has been providing facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando for only a few dollars a month, according to documents obtained by American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, paving the way for a roll-out of technology that is causing concern among civil rights groups.

Amazon is providing the technology, known as Rekognition, as well as consulting services, according to the documents, which the ACLU obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The cities adopted the technology without prior public discussion, the documents reveal.

A coalition of civil rights groups, in a letter released Tuesday, called on Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement because it could prop up surveillance of vulnerable communities.

“We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country,” the groups wrote in the letter.

Amazon spokeswoman Nina Lindsey did not address the concerns of civil rights groups. “Amazon requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use AWS services,” she said, referring to Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud software division that houses the facial recognition program. “When we find that AWS services are being abused by a customer, we suspend that customer’s right to use our services.”

A view of automated check-in counters at Changi Airport Terminal 4 in Singapore, April 3, 2018. Changi’s newest terminal, T4, already uses facial recognition technology to offer self-service options at check-in, bag drop, immigration and boarding. Photo: Reuters

She said that the technology has many useful purposes, and that customers have used it to find abducted people and amusement parks have used the program to find lost children. During the royal wedding this past weekend, clients used Rekognition to identify wedding attendees, she said. (Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.)

The details about Amazon’s program illustrate the sprawl of cutting-edge technologies deep into American society – often without public vetting or debate. Axon, the maker of Taser electroshock weapons and the wearable body cameras for police, has voiced interest in pursuing face recognition for its body-worn cameras, prompting a similar backlash from civil rights groups. Hundreds of Google employees protested last month to demand that the company stop providing artificial intelligence to the Pentagon to help analyse drone footage.

Amazon publicly introduced Rekognition in November 2016, with the promise that its clients could benefit from artificial intelligence technology developed by the company’s scientists to analyse billions of images and videos daily. Marketers could use the image recognition software to recognise celebrities in their videos, while owners of dating apps could use the program to identify unwanted suggestive or explicit content, according to the company’s website.

“Once powerful surveillance systems like these are built and deployed, the harm can’t be undone. We’re talking about a technology that will supercharge surveillance in our communities,” said Nicole Ozer, Technology and Civil Liberties Director for the ACLU of Northern California. She said the technology could be used “to track protesters, target immigrants, and spy on entire neighbourhoods.”

The documents provide a detailed look at how Amazon is marketing Rekognition. It can identify up to 100 people in a crowd, the documents said.

The sheriff’s office of Washington County, Oregon, built a database of 300,000 mug shots of suspected criminals that officers could have Rekognition scan against footage of potential suspects in real-time. The footage could come from police body cameras and public and private cameras. The county pays Amazon between $6 and $12 dollars a month for the service, a county spokesman said.

According to the documents, Amazon asked the county to tout its experience with Rekognition to other public sector customers, including a manufacturer of body cameras.

Chinese firm YITU Technology introduces a facial-recogniton enabled surveillance camera. Photo: SCMP

Deputy Jeff Talbot, public information officer for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, said the program was not operating in the shadows and had been the subject of several news local stories. He pointed out that jail booking photos are already public, and that the software simply allows officers to scan them instantaneously and in real-time, and compare them against footage of actual suspects, which is a valuable contribution to public safety. “Our goal is to inform the public about the work we’re doing to solve crimes. It is not mass surveillance or untargeted surveillance.”

He could not say how many crimes the program had helped solve and added that the software wasn’t always accurate. But he said that officers were trained not to rely exclusively on the software to make decisions, and that it was just an additional tool in the officer’s tool kit. For the cheap price Amazon was offering, he said it made sense to test out the service.

Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations San Francisco Bay area office, one of the groups that signed the letter, said that many people who are booked into jail are not always charged with a crime or are proved innocent. She said that she worried that people’s civil rights are violated when law enforcement keep their images in a database even after they are proved innocent or were never charged. She said that Amazon was contributing to these violations by making it easier to scan people’s faces, repeatedly exposing them to surveillance.

In addition to the ACLU, the coalition of about 40 groups included Color of Change, Harvard Law Criminal Justice Institute, Human Rights Watch, Muslim Advocates and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Amazon is one of many companies selling artificial intelligence tools such as facial recognition and image-scanning to business clients. Microsoft offers a rival service, called Facial Recognition API. A crop of start-ups market the ability to scan the emotions on people’s faces as they walk in and out of stores. Such technology has been touted as a way to prevent shoplifting.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Amazon tech deal with police under fire
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