Amazon has announced a one-year moratorium on the sale of #Rekognition, its facial recognition tool, to US law-enforcement.
bbc.com/news/business-…
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bbc.com/news/business-…
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The company has renewed its call for Congress to pass laws regulating FR technology. A charitable interpretation of this call is that the company is genuinely concerned with the abuse of its tools.
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However, if that's true, it could voluntarily withdraw its products from customers like ICE and law enforcement.
A more realistic take is that the company wants to have an external authority it can appeal to when it is accused of unethical conduct.
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A more realistic take is that the company wants to have an external authority it can appeal to when it is accused of unethical conduct.
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That is, "We're just doing what Congress told us to do."
And of course, federal laws mean that any forbearance from Amazon in its sales to cops will not disadvantage it relative to less ethical rivals.
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And of course, federal laws mean that any forbearance from Amazon in its sales to cops will not disadvantage it relative to less ethical rivals.
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Some opponents of sales of FR to law enforcement stress that FR systems have well-understood biases (stemming from poor training data) that make it less reliable when asked to recognize Black and brown faces.
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However, as I wrote when IBM pulled out of the facial recognition business a couple days ago, this is a dangerously incomplete critique.
pluralistic.net/2020/06/09/war…
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pluralistic.net/2020/06/09/war…
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Because if the main problem with FR is that it fails to recognize racialized peoples' faces, then the answer is to feed FR systems with new training pictures of PoCs until it is highly accurate at recognizing them.
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Which is to say, until the police have a perfect tool for tracking and identifying people of color.
That's what happened in China, where tech giants fixed their Black FR problem by requisitioning the entire Zimbabwean drivers' license database.
foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/bei…
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That's what happened in China, where tech giants fixed their Black FR problem by requisitioning the entire Zimbabwean drivers' license database.
foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/bei…
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Today, Chinese state security can use FR to reliably identify and track African faces within China (and they can sell this capability to African states that are entering into debtor relationships with China to acquire tech capacity).
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This is hardly a bright spot for racial equality.
The problem with FR for law enforcement is that it sets up a high-tech totalitarian surveillance state: not that it fails to recognize Black faces well enough.
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The problem with FR for law enforcement is that it sets up a high-tech totalitarian surveillance state: not that it fails to recognize Black faces well enough.
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