FB pixel

Privacy groups call on Amazon to stop marketing facial recognition technology to police

Categories Biometrics News  |  Law Enforcement
 

Privacy activists including the American Civil Liberties Union are asking Amazon to stop marketing its Rekognition technology to police, out of concern for its use with body cameras and cameras monitoring public areas, the Washington Post reports.

The ACLU and other groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch, wrote to Amazon after receiving responses to public record requests to law enforcement agencies using Rekognition. Promotional materials from Amazon recommend using the service with body cameras, which would make it easy for law enforcement to monitor public protests and historically disproportionally targeted groups like ethnic minorities and immigrants, the ACLU says.

“People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government,” the ACLU writes in a post. “By automating mass surveillance, facial recognition systems like Rekognition threaten this freedom, posing a particular threat to communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate. Once powerful surveillance systems like these are built and deployed, the harm will be extremely difficult to undo.”

Rekognition is currently used by the Police Department of Orlando, Florida, and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon. Records show the sheriff’s office was able to load over 300,000 booking photos into the system for $400, and pays $6 a month to use it, with deputies utilizing the service roughly 20 times per day.

“We are not mass-collecting. We are not putting a camera out on a street corner,” Deputy Jeff Talbot, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office told the Post. “We want our local community to be aware of what we’re doing, how we’re using it to solve crimes — what it is and, just as importantly, what it is not.”

Amazon boosted the performance capabilities of Rekognition late last year to include real-time recognition across tens of millions of faces, and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowd photos.

Article Topics

 |   |   |   | 

Latest Biometrics News

 

Philippines senator says biometric verification will address gambling payments fraud

Some senators in the Philippines have positively received a move by the country’s central bank to address the challenges faced…

 

Kenya considers dedicated digital ID in digital trade policy reform

Kenya’s Ministry of Investments, Trade and Industry (MITI) is leading an initiative that seeks to introduce a compulsory digital ID…

 

Pentagon invests $1 billion in commercial AI for national security missions

In one of the most sweeping AI investments in U.S. defense history, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Chief Digital and…

 

ICE’s facial recognition app raises alarms over expansion of domestic surveillance

In early 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) quietly expanded its biometric surveillance footprint with the deployment of a powerful…

 

Paravision reveals biometrics partnerships with Toppan Next Tech, PopID, Imprivata

A group of partnerships with Paravision providing face biometrics to Toppan Next Tech, PopID and Imprivata have been revealed in…

 

Ohio passes age verification law for adult content sites

Age assurance legislation continues to mature across the U.S., with Ohio becoming the latest state to pass a law requiring…

Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Biometric Market Analysis

Most Viewed This Week

Featured Company

Biometrics Insight, Opinion

Digital ID In-Depth

Biometrics White Papers

Biometrics Events