ACLU Blasts Amazon Facial Recognition

(RTTNews) - The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy activists are urging Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition software to police departments.

The organization claims that the "technology poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country."

"Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments. This product poses a grave threat to communities, including people of color and immigrants, and to the trust and respect Amazon has worked to build. Amazon must act swiftly to stand up for civil rights and civil liberties, including those of its own customers, and take Rekognition off the table for governments." ACLU said in a letter to Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon.

Amazon claims that Rekognition can identify people in real-time by instantaneously searching databases containing tens of millions of faces. Amazon offers a "person tracking" feature that it says "makes investigation and monitoring of individuals easy and accurate" for "surveillance applications." Amazon says Rekognition can be used to identify "all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports"—at a time when Americans are joining public protests at unprecedented levels.

Earlier, Amazon has said that the Washington County Sherrif's Office in Oregon "has been using Amazon Rekognition over the past year to reduce the identification time of reported suspects from 2-3 days down to minutes and had apprehended their first suspect within a week by using their new system."