Amazon helps law enforcement with facial recognition technology

Amazon is teaming up with law enforcement agencies to deploy its new facial recognition technology.

Amazon’s Rekognition technology provides accurate facial analysis and facial recognition.

It can detect, analyse, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, cataloging, people counting, and public safety uses.

Amazon Rekognition is based on the scalable deep learning technology developed by Amazon’s computer vision scientists to analyse billions of images and videos daily.

Rekognition is a simple API that can analyse any image or video file stored in Amazon S3.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundations of California (ACLU) said Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.

The organisation demanded that Amazon stop allowing governments to use Rekognition.

“With Rekognition, a government can now build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone,” said the ACLU.

“People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government. By automating mass surveillance, this freedom is threatened.”