Amazon selling facial recognition to police

Amazon is selling real-time facial recognition services to the police and it’s being used to store thousands of mugshots

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technology/amazon-is-selling-real-time-facial-recognition-services-to-the-police-and-it%e2%80%99s-being-used-to-store-thousands-of-mugshots/ar-AAxG2h5?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=mailsignout

Culturally speaking, surveillance is treated differently country by country. You may remember a few months ago that China seemed pretty proud of its facial recognition software, which was effectively catching wanted criminals in Zhengzhou. By publicising the software, some could read an implicitly menacing message to dissidents: if we can watch criminals, we can watch you.

It was easy to feel a sense of relief that such worrying encroachments of civil liberties still feel culturally off limits in the West, but the truth is that these things happen here too: there’s just more of an incentive to keep things on the down-low.

Case in point: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California has obtained documents showing how police forces in Orlando and Oregon’s Washington County are using Amazon’s facial recognition software for real-time use on police body cameras and municipal surveillance systems. Nondisclosure agreements have prevented the exposure of this partnership until now.

Your first reaction to this might be to wonder why Amazon has facial recognition software in the first place – after all, it doesn’t seem to be part of its core business model. The software, called Rekognition, was created in late 2016 and sold as part of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Its uses go from the well-meaning (identification of lost children in amusement parks) to the benign (identifying guests at the royal wedding), but unsurprisingly its use in police surveillance isn’t something that appears prominently in customer-facing marketing literature – though it is in there.

Nonetheless, The Washington Post has discovered that the sheriff’s office of Washington County has built a database of 300,000 mugshots that can be used with Rekognition in real-time. This apparently costs the country between $6 and $12 a month, which feels unnervingly cheap.

To be entirely fair to Amazon, it has publicised the extent of the project in Orlando – just a safe 7,500 miles away at the AWS conference in Seoul. There, Rekognition project director Ranju Das told the crowd: “There are cameras all over the city. Authorised cameras are streaming the data to Kinesis video stream…. We analyse that data in real time and search against the collection of faces that they have. Maybe they want to know if the mayor of the city is in a place, or there are persons of interest they want to track.”

Unsurprisingly, where Amazon sees convenience, the ACLU sees trouble. “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,” the group wrote. “Once powerful surveillance systems like these are built and deployed, the harm will be extremely difficult to undo.”

Amazon’s response is clear: if a client is using Rekognition in an unlawful or irresponsible manner, it will put a stop to it. Otherwise it sees the technology as an essential part of our future. “Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology,” the company wrote in a widely circulated statement. “Imagine if customers couldn’t buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal purposes?”

How does it work. Does it take a mugshot using the selfie camera. What about computers with no webcam?

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Ok many thanks for those. have had a brief read of some of those but don’t know how amazon could acquire my image, unless I install. Unless further they are installed remotely on my phone.

My iPhone screen switches off when i put to my ear. So I put my finger over the selfie camera and it does the same thing. Ergo the camera is on all the time. I have suspected for sometime that when I take a photo from iPhone that the selfie takes mine as well and stores it in the image code of the forward taken photo. Why? So photos can readily be traced back to the original photographer for security / tracking purposes. When you use a mobile device to take a picture you stare at the screen to line up the shot and you are looking straight into the selfie camera. All it then needs is the location data and time stamp included and you have full data on who, when and where taken.

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To prevent your tablet or phone from updating your latest image that ypu could place a bit of tape as that would prevent any updated images when you take any pics.

Thanks all. I have been doing the tape thing. The material used to make the iPads and iPhones is deliberately sloppery and the insulation tape slips