US Police use of Amazon’s face-recognition service draws privacy warnings
Amazon is actively courting law-enforcement agencies to use a cloud-based facial-recognition service that can identify people in real time, the American Civil Liberties Union reported Tuesday, citing the documents obtained from two US departments.
The service, which Amazon markets under the name Rekognition, can recognize as many as 100 people in a single image and can compare images against databases containing tens of millions of faces. Company executives describe deployment by law enforcement agencies as common use case.
Well, this will make for an interesting debate… Reasons cited are for the "safety of citizens" but one hopes law-abiding citizens had some say, and there is a difference between recognition and tracking so the manner of usage will be interesting to hear about. Recognition of offenders could be done by only storing offenders faces for matching, whilst tracking would mean storing all faces seen and matching over time to a bigger database which could identify who goes where and when no matter if you are wanted or a crime or not. Neither may, in fact, be acceptable to citizens but it is often amazing how police agencies decide things in private (to protect those same citizens of course). George Orwell certainly saw what was coming clearer than anyone else did! So glad my daughter just started reading 1984 as school setwork book.
#surveillance #facerecognition #Rekognition
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Police use of Amazon’s face-recognition service draws privacy warnings Cloud-based service can index millions of faces and recognize 100 people in an image. |