From CNET: Concerns over Amazon's facial recognition program have now reached the company's shareholders.
Along with civil liberties groups, members of Congress and Amazon's own employees, a group of shareholders is now also calling on the retail giant to stop selling Rekognition to government agencies.
Rekognition is a facial recognition program Amazon sells to law enforcement agencies in Florida and reportedly marketed to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The program has been criticized for not being completely reliable, often making mistakes with its matches. Last July, the ACLU found that Rekognition mismatched 28 members of Congress with known criminals using a database of 25,000 mugshots.
Facial recognition in general -- not just from Amazon -- has also been controversial because some see it as an invasion of privacy that's also open to technical problems. In China, a surveillance program mistakenly recognized a face on a bus ad as a jaywalker. Despite the outcry, facial recognition is expanding to airports, concerts and grocery stores.
While facial recognition has seeped into our everyday lives, its use by government agencies is perhaps the the most problematic. More than 85 human rights groups have joined the ACLU to ask companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google to stop selling facial recognition to governments. The main concern is that the technology could be used to discriminate and mistakenly punish innocent people.
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