The Orlando Police Department is giving up on its trial deployment of Amazon’s Rekognition platform, once again ending its on again/off again relationship with the tech giant. The facial recognition tech was supposed to be part of a surveillance pilot that would allow the OPD to track suspicious individuals through the city in real time.…
Apple’s introduction of the face-scanning Face ID system in 2017’s iPhone X went a long way in helping to make facial recognition for authentication a mainstream technology among consumers. But it was Amazon that really made facial recognition for large-scale public identification explode into the national discourse as an ethical issue, after an ACLU report…
Amazon is now calling for government regulation of facial recognition technology, even as it defends sales of its own such technology to law enforcement authorities. In a new post on the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning blog, the company’s VP of Global Public Policy, Michael Punke, writes, “We support the calls for an appropriate national…
The inaugural MIT AI Policy Congress recently convened in Massachusetts, bringing together leading researchers, industry insiders, and policy experts for a series of discussions about the future of artificial intelligence. Hosted by MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the conversation stressed the importance of collaboration and…
A newly published patent application from Amazon outlines a smart doorbell designed to use facial recognition for a kind of technologically-enhanced neighborhood watch. The essential idea is to let users add suspicious individuals to a watch list, which is shared by a given community network based on connected houses using the biometric doorbell system. When…
Facial recognition technology has had a big year, in good ways and bad. On the positive side, Apple signaled a more or less definitive switch to 3D facial recognition as the primary mechanism for user authentication on its flagship smartphones: Having made a big splash last year with its introduction of Face ID on the…
“A key component of the GMCNgine is Rekognition, Amazon’s controversial computer vision platform.” Facial recognition technology’s growing role in the fight against child exploitation could see a substantial expansion after the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children’s launch of a new AI-driven system this week. Called the GMCNgine, the system leverages machine learning and artificial…
It has been another remarkable year for the biometrics industry, with a lot of activity across a wide range of sectors. Apple, which spearheaded the mobile biometrics revolution with its launch of Touch ID five years ago, went ahead and confirmed its shift to 3D facial recognition with the launch of three new iPhones featuring…
“After an ACLU report revealed that Amazon had been selling facial recognition technology to police earlier this year, an assortment of privacy rights activists, shareholders, and even Amazon employees publicly decried the practice and called on the company to stop. “ Amazon is showing no sign of backing off from its marketing and sales of…
“…in responding the ACLU’s latest volley, a spokesperson emphasized that Rekognition is used to aid human review, and not to definitively link one facial image to another” The ACLU has turned Amazon’s facial recognition technology against the company itself in a damning new demonstration highlighting the technology’s flaws. The civil rights organization says that it…
Amazon’s own employees have now joined the chorus of voices calling for the company to halt its sale of biometric surveillance technology to law enforcement and other government agencies. Their demand has surfaced in an open letter to Jeff Bezos with an undisclosed number of signatories. The letter has arrived immediately after another open letter,…
Just a month after the ACLU made Amazon’s sale of facial recognition technology to government authorities a matter of public debate, a group of prominent Amazon shareholders are calling on the company to halt such business activities, at least until the proper oversight is put in place. The controversy concerns Rekognition, Amazon’s machine vision solution,…
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is pushing back against the ACLU’s efforts to get Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government organizations. The outcry began about a week ago, when the ACLU published information concerning multiple police agencies’ use of Rekognition, a machine learning, computer vision system that runs on Amazon…
“Responding to the report, the Orlando Police Department’s chief, John Mina, held a press conference at which he insisted that his department was only testing the technology, with seven officers having volunteered to have their faces tracked through OPD cameras.” Amazon and the Orlando Police Department are playing down the use of facial recognition technology…