Amazon face recognition
sj785 opened this issue · 1 comments
As covered in the digest:
Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots
Jacob Snow, ACLU
ACLU matches image
Credit: from ACLU's article
The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) recently conducted a test of Amazon’s “Rekognition” facial recognition tool, and found that “the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime.” Their piece about the test goes on to say:
Matching people against arrest photos is not a hypothetical exercise. Amazon is aggressively marketing its face surveillance technology to police, boasting that its service can identify up to 100 faces in a single image, track people in real time through surveillance cameras, and scan footage from body cameras. A sheriff’s department in Oregon has already started using Amazon Rekognition to compare people’s faces against a mugshot database, without any public debate.
And that:
Congress must take these threats seriously, hit the brakes, and enact a moratorium on law enforcement use of face recognition. This technology shouldn’t be used until the harms are fully considered and all necessary steps are taken to prevent them from harming vulnerable communities.
Amazon’s Dr. Matt Wood wrote a response that noted that “The ACLU has not published its data set, methodology, or results in detail, so we can only go on what they’ve publicly said” and listed several issues with the bits of the methodology that were disclosed (such as the confidence threshold, training dataset, and more). The ACLU responded by denying were there issues with their methodology and stating that “In its five stages of grief over its dangerous face surveillance product, Amazon is clearly stuck at denial”.
Done!