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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.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:57PM (3 children)
Do you own an Android phone? It's no different than Amazon Echo in all surveillance respects. In fact, it's worse because it travels with you when the Echo stays stationary.
I balked at buying an Echo, and then realized I had already openly and willingly accepted the surveillance state.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:40AM (1 child)
All cellphones have this issue, not just Android phones.
As for the question: I don't own a cellphone, for this very reason.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday May 31 2018, @11:25AM
Yeah. But the smart phones are just so damned convenient for communication and coordination when you have a family. If I didn't have kids, I'd ditch mine or at least turn it off (and maybe transport it in a Faraday Cage) when I didn't have a specific need for it.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday May 31 2018, @10:05AM
The Apple / iTunes integration is no different.
They haven't properly complied with EU data protection law in decades... they never had a DPA notice, now they don't have a GDPR notice (not a legal one anyway).
You literally have NO IDEA where your Apple-stored data actually is, there's a line in the privacy policy which basically says "we reserve the right to store your data anywhere".
Also they also utilise Google, Azure and AWS storage to run iCloud - there have been articles on The Register about it.
So if you can't have Android, can't have Apple, Windows phones are dead but they are all in the Microsoft accounts/cloud... what does that leave? Tiny, niche players in the market making things you've never heard of.
Told you - you've ALREADY accepted it, just by owning a modern phone.