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Amazon's facial recognition software is no longer used in Orlando, government officials and police said in a joint statement this week, following criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union.
The tool, Amazon Rekognition, is being marketed directly to US law enforcement, and the ACLU in May revealed that the city of Florida has been using it since 2017. Monday, the # ACLU requested that the "secret" program be discontinued, noting that it lacked public consent and could potentially be exploited to "carry out mass localization tracking of residents without criminal suspicion".
The city decided to abandon the project, for the moment at least, noting that the Rekognition pilot had expired last week. "Staff continues to discuss and evaluate if there is any reason to recommend continuation of the pilot project at a later date," police and government officials said Monday at floridapolitics.com.
"At the moment this process is still underway and the contract with Amazon has expired.The partnership with innovative companies to test new technologies – while ensuring compliance with privacy laws and in no way violating the rights of others – is essential for us when we work at […] Keep our community safe "
ACLU Legal Director in Florida, Nancy Abudu, urged Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer to abandon the platform this week, commenting in a long letter that the software was "primed" for abuse.
She wrote, "People should be free to walk the street without being supervised by the government. Face surveillance in Orlando threatens this freedom, especially when government agencies deploy it without community debate, local legislative control, and rules to prevent misuse. Therefore, we require that Orlando immediately suspend its use of Rekognition. "
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Amazon has not responded to a request for comment from Newsweek.
According to Reuters, Orlando police said it did not use technology to conduct active investigations.
Criticisms of facial scanning technology, which is also criticized by large corporations, including Google and Microsoft, are no longer limited to privacy activists. Last week, Amazon staff circulated a letter asking CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling the software to US law enforcement. They also talked about technological links with the US Immigration and Customs Agency (ICE).
"Our society should not be in the surveillance sector, we should not be in the policing sector, we should not be helping people who are watching and oppressing marginalized populations," the workers wrote. similarly hit Google about its links to an American drone program bearing the project name Maven.Micros was also criticized last week for providing technology products to ICE in light of the immigration policy of Trump administration consisting of separating families.
In an article published on June 1, Amazon's chief executive officer of artificial intelligence, Dr. Matt Wood, attempted to minimize concerns about the software, which can perform real-time searches on collections with tens of millions of faces. up to 100 faces from a single image.
"[Amazon] takes its responsibilities seriously, "said Wood." But we think it's a bad approach to banning promising new technologies because they could be used by bad actors for harmful purposes. " in the future. "He continued:" The world would be a very different place if we had to buy computers because it was possible to use this computer to hurt . "
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