Amazon will force its Flex Delivery drivers to take selfies for face recognition authentication

Amazon's internal distribution service, Amazon Flex, will require its pilots to take photos of themselves to be validated with facial recognition.

The detail, reported for the first time by Business Insider, shows that Amazon is increasingly controlling the work of Flex pilots, which the company considers as independent contractors and not by employees. They drive their own vehicles, pay for things like vehicle wear and gas, and are not entitled to benefits such as health care.

The working conditions of Flex drivers were reported by Gizmodo in 2017 and have remained largely unchanged since then. Meanwhile, the regulatory framework has become increasingly critical of companies that rely on a large number of contract workers – workers who do not lack politicians, activists and lawsuits have argued that they were badly clbadified.

It is unclear how often pilots are asked to self-authenticate, what happens to these stored facial data or whether Amazon is forced to delete that data if the driver had to exit or become disabled. Neither is it known which facial recognition software suite is deployed for this purpose – although one can imagine that Amazon is using its own internal software package, Rekognition.

The recognition sparked strong criticism from lawmakers and ethicists, due to its alleged biases and Amazon's willingness to provide software to law enforcement. Gizmodo learned earlier this year that the company argued that the company had claimed that the acknowledgment of not being misused by the police was not misused.

If Rekognition is the software being deployed, the Flex drivers can be used as a set of data to refine and improve the software, much like the Flex application tracks the drivers' routes and uses that data to increase logistics efficiency of Amazon. Amazon told Verge that face-recognition authentication was aimed at reducing fraud.

Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment on these issues, or if this new monitoring strategy extends to parallel programs such as its network of distribution service partners.

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