Amazon’s Rekognition Service, Coming to a Police Department Near You?
Amazon Rekognition, deep learning-based image and video analysis
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amazon, “Earth’s most customer-centric company,” has officially entered the surveillance business. The company has developed what the ACLU describes as “a powerful and dangerous new facial recognition system” that it is actively helping governments to deploy. Amazon calls the service “Rekognition.”
The company has developed a powerful and dangerous new facial recognition system and is actively helping governments deploy it. Amazon calls the service “Rekognition.”
The Amazon Rekognition website (links below) describes the system as “deep learning-based image and video analysis.” The ACLU says the marketing materials and documents they’ve obtained reveal a product that can be readily used to violate civil liberties and civil rights. “Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image” said the ACLU blogpost on the topic (links below). The marketing materials claim the system can quickly scan the information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.
Marketing Rekognition to your local government authorities
The ACLU says that Amazon is marketing Rekognition to local governments for government surveillance and views deployment by law enforcement agencies as a “common use case” for the technology. The marketing materials apparently boast that Rekognition can be used to identify “people of interest” and can monitor “all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports”.
With Rekognition, a government can now build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone.
Amazon’s Rekogntion website seems to echo what the ACLU is saying. The site touts such uses as finding missing persons in social media video content, as well as conducting “sentiment analysis” and “license plate verification.” All of which translate into the government scooping up all kinds of visual data into a database that can analyze “emotion attributes” of people and “identify vehicles driving in front of a camera.”
The ACLU argues that with Rekognition, “a government can now build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone.” But in today’s America, where people fight over which authoritarian statist puppet of the banking-military-industrial cartel should be in charge of taking away their wealth and freedom, does anybody really care? Besides, if you’re not doing anything wrong what do you have to worry about? Right?
Related: Did Trump Just Authorize Skynet?
Resource Links:
- Amazon Teams Up With Law Enforcement to Deploy Dangerous New Facial Recognition Technology, ACLU Blog, May, 22, 2018
- Amazon Rekognition page at Amazon.com
- Surveillance cameras image credit, BigStockPhoto.com
