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At a company-wide meeting today, Amazon discussed its relationship with law enforcement agencies, including Immigrations Customs and Enforcement, its first direct response to concerns expressed by employees in June about the company's often successful attempts to provide cloud infrastructure and facial recognition software. authorities.
According to two current Amazon workers, the questions posed today were pre-selected and there were no microphones for questions and answers in person. Nevertheless, a question regarding these uses of the company's facial recognition software, called Rekognition, has been incorporated into the program:
"What is being done to address the concerns expressed by Amazon employees and civil rights groups about Amazon selling facial recognition technologies to government and police organizations, including ICE?", Reads -on the question, according to a transcript of remarks addressed to Gizmodo's Amazon Employee Mailing List. According to this transcript, CEO Jeff Bezos forwarded the question to Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy. His response is somewhat blurred in the transcript, but the bottom line is that Amazon's terms of service for its facial recognition products are sufficient to protect people from misuse.
His remarks are below:
Thank you, so we're referring to Amazon Rekognition, which is AWS 'image recognition, facial recognition and advanced video recognition service. And, you know, with over 500,000 employees like at Amazon, I think we'll have people who have very different opinions, which is great, but we really feel very good about the value of this Amazonian recognition ( sic) provides our clients of all sizes and types of industries, both in law enforcement and law enforcement.
You see it in the value that people get even after about a year and a half of service where Rekognition is actively used to help end human trafficking, reunite missing children with their parents for educational applications, to security and multifactorial reasons. authentication.
Amazonian recognition (sic) provides great value. Now, of course, whatever technology you use, you must make sure that you use it responsibly. This is true with new and existing technologies. Just think of all the harm that could be done with computers or servers. Think about what would be our world if we do not allow people to have a computer. You do not want to get rid of this technology. You want to make sure that users use technology responsibly, and AWS offers a set of conditions and services. And with all our services, including recognition, where if people violate these terms of service and do not use them responsibly, they will no longer be able to use our services. In fact, if we find that people are violating the constitutional rights of these people, they will no longer be able to use the services. I also think, by the way, that in a democracy, the government also often has the role and the responsibility to clarify the directives and regulations relating to technology. And if and when that happens, we will respect them as well. Thank you.
The project on government oversight revealed earlier this year that Amazon had approached ICE about the use of recognition. ICE previously told Gizmodo that it did not have a specific contract with Amazon for facial recognition. Although ICE has contracts with the data mining company Palantir, which uses AWS as a cloud computing platform. The employees specifically mentioned Amazon's work with Palantir in their letter to the company's leaders.
The company has also actively marketed facial recognition technology to the police, in partnership with law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Florida, as noted in documents obtained by the company. 39; ACLU.
An Amazon employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear or retaliation told Gizmodo that Jassy's response did not provide a satisfactory response to workers' concerns. "Should we sell a service to a customer that we know is going to use it in an unethical way, simply because the customer is a government? One of the principles of the Amazon leadership is "insist on the highest standards", but "is this practice clearly illegal?" Is the lowest possible standard.
We have contacted Amazon for a comment and we will update it if we hear it again.
Update: Minor typographical errors in the transcript have been modified to reflect Amazon's official transcript.
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