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posted by janrinok on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the land-of-the-watched dept.

At the Private Internet Access Blog, Glyn Moody writes how Amazon and US schools are following in China's footsteps to normalize automatic facial recognition and constant surveillance. Materials gained Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU have documented that Amazon has been marketing in its hosted "Rekognition" products to both police forces and schools to facilitate mass surveillance inside the US and to inure the coming generations to it.

Amazon has developed a powerful cloud-based facial recognition system called "Rekognition", which has major implications for privacy. It is already being used by multiple US police forces to carry out surveillance and make arrests, the ACLU has learned.

Amazon claims that Rekognition offers real-time face matching across tens of millions of individuals held in a database, and can detect up to 100 faces in a single photo of a crowd. Rekognition can be used to analyze videos, and to track people even when their faces are not visible, or as they go in and out of the scene.

As a result of these disclosures, a coalition of organizations including the ACLU has sent a letter to Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that the company stop providing its facial recognition tool to the government. The ACLU has also launched a petition that calls for the same.

Emails obtained through freedom of information requests submitted by the ACLU show that Amazon has worked with the city of Orlando, Florida, and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon to roll out Rekognition in those locations. In addition, law enforcement agencies in California, Arizona, and multiple domestic surveillance "fusion centers" have indicated interest in Rekognition, although it is not clear how many of these have gone on to deploy the system. Orlando has used Rekognition to search for people in footage drawn from the city's video surveillance cameras. Washington County, meanwhile, has built a Rekognition-based mobile app that its deputies can use to run any image against the county's database of 300,000 faces.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:31PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:31PM (#685659) Journal

    Celebrities have their accounts hacked and their photos exposed and - as a civilisation - we're more interested in what they were saying...

    Who the fuck cares about what they were saying, were are interested only if there were nude pictures and what's the site those pictures were uploaded unto (large grin)

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:06AM

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:06AM (#686005)

    The problem with happening across nude pictures of celebrities on the Internet is that I never have any idea who the celebrity is.