TAMPA, Fla. -- Amazon is selling a product that the American Civil Liberties Union is calling too powerful, too dangerous and downright harmful to our society.
The Orlando Police Department is one of the owners of Rekognition, which can identify and track people in real time.
C-SPAN uses it to tag who is speaking on camera, and Pinterest uses it to spot text inside pictures.
The most controversial use of Amazon Rekognition is by law enforcement. Orlando police are testing it out on city cameras.
The ACLU says, “People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government. By automating mass surveillance, facial recognition systems like Rekognition threaten this freedom."
A spokesperson for the Orlando Police Department said for the pilot program, the department is not using images of the public.
The department declined an interview, but a sheriff's office in Oregon is already using the technology to solve crimes.
“It makes them more efficient and better at fighting crime,” Deputy Jeff Talbot of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon said.
Amazon's facial recognition technology does have the ability to track people in real-time. However, the Washington County Sheriff's Office points out, that's not how it's using the technology.
“We are using it only to identify unidentified suspects in criminal investigations,” Talbot said.
They do that by creating a database of hundreds of thousands of mugshots. When they put this still from surveillance video in the system, the guy's old mug comes up. When they looked up his Facebook page to verify his identity, the jacket he had on in a picture was the same one he wore when committing the theft, Talbot said.
The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office has been using a similar facial recognition software for years. As far as we know, it can't track you in real time. It’s also not made by Amazon, whose technology is raising concerns big brother might be watching.
Still, Amazon is defending its technology.
“Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “Imagine if customers couldn’t buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal purposes?”
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