- The ACLU of Northern California obtains documents about Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) facial recognition project Rekognition.
- Police in Orlando, Florida and Washington County in Oregon currently use Rekognition to use its real-time facial recognition system on police body camera footage and municipal surveillance systems.
- Key quote from the ACLU, airing concerns: “By automating mass surveillance, facial recognition systems like Rekognition threaten this freedom, posing a particular threat to communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate. People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government.”
- The ACLU and other groups want Amazon to stop providing Rekognition to law enforcement and government agencies. Rekognition, part of the AWS cloud, also serves enterprise clients like Pinterest and C-SPAN for object recognition and analytics.
- Amazon shares are down 0.3% to $1,581.10.