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Amazon has met with officials of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the summer to try to sell its controversial facial recognition technology to the law enforcement agency, reported the Daily Beast.
The technology, called "Recognition", can identify people in real time, according to documents obtained by the Governmental Monitoring Project (POGO). The tests revealed concerns about the accuracy of the tool and former ICE officials have expressed concerns about how it could be misused.
In July, the ACLU reported problems with the Amazon software. The civil liberties monitoring body said that during a test, the facial recognition tool had mistakenly identified 28 members of Congress as people arrested for crimes.
"The fake matches were disproportionately about people of color," said the ACLU.
Democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns about the reliability of facial recognition software, which can compare a face to millions of people in a database in one second.
"A series of studies has shown that face recognition technology is consistently less accurate at identifying the faces of African Americans and women than compared to Caucasians and men," wrote Keith Ellison and Emanuel Cleaver, representatives at the beginning of the year.
The Daily Beast noted that "during this administration, ICE agents targeted immigrants who were trying to enter and exit medical institutions and places of worship, despite the fact that they were in danger." an official policy that discourages apprehension in "sensitive places". " The point of sale said that a facial recognition software would allow law enforcement to automate such surveillance.
The ACLU's Higher Legislative Council, Neema Singh Guliani, reprimanded ICE and Amazon.
"ICE should not use facial recognition to enforce immigration laws." Congress has never authorized such use and it would be irresponsible to allow this technology to be used. to support ICE's ongoing efforts to terrorize immigrant communities across the country.The public deserves to know if the agency is deploying or planning to deploy this technology, "said Guliani.
"It is troubling that Amazon continues knowingly ignoring warnings from members of Congress, civil rights groups, the public, and its own shareholders and employees about the dangers of its technology." History tells us that surveillance technology is often misused to target immigrants and political parties, and we have every reason to fear that this time is no different. "
Neither Amazon nor ICE offered comments to Newsweek before publication.
ICE told POGO "We can not provide data on the number of times we have met a particular vendor to discuss emerging technologies that he is developing, but the industry's awareness and establishment of Relationships with potential contractors are relatively common in government acquisitions "Beast Everyday."
Amazon's attempt for ICE to adopt Rekognition seems to correspond to broader industry trends.
The Guardian reported Tuesday that technology companies are making significant profits by sending tools to immigration control agencies, citing a report from research firm Empower LLC.
The study notes that Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir. Amazon Web Services supports DHS storage of biometric data on more than 200 million people.
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