In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California performed a test using Amazon’s “Rekognition” software, comparing the faces of 435 US Congress members to mugshots in a public database. The software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to the mugshots, and thus misidentified them as other people who had been arrested for a crime.
These false matches were predominantly people of color. In their letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the Congressional Balck Caucus “expressed concern about the profound negative unintended consequences face surveillance could have for Black people, undocumented immigrants, and protestors” (Snow, 2018).
This software, and other similar softwares from Microsoft and IBM have been used in law enforcement to identify perpetrators in police body-cameras etc. A false identification could cost people their lives and their freedom.
Prior to the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, Amazon was aggressively marketing its face surveillance technology to police. This horrific event sparked an international reckoning, which also led to criticism of such surveillance technologies. Since then, House and Senate Democrats introduced a police reform bill which includes a proposal to limit face recognition in the law enforcement context shedding light on racist policing practices.
On June 10, 2020, Amazon announced that it would be issuing a moratorium on the use of their facial technologies for law enforcement purposes. Whether this year will be enough to introduce stricter policies on the use of software like Rekognition is doubted by many critics. They also raise the question, can facial surveillance ever be neutral and non-discriminatory?
#technology #technews #amazonreview #rekognition #aclu_nationwide #aclu
This resource was originally posted to the @ thealgorithmicyou Instagram page on August 12, 2020.
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