United States: after IBM, Amazon prohibits the police from using facial recognition

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Amazon announced Wednesday (June 10th) that it will prohibit the police from using its facial recognition software Rekognition for a year, in the context of protests against police violence and racism in the United States for two weeks. The firm followed suit with IBM, which had taken the same initiative earlier this week.

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Civil society organizations, such as the powerful American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have been calling on Amazon for two years to stop supplying its facial recognition technology to the police, recalls Agence France Presse . Recall that facial recognition, based on artificial intelligence technologies, can be used to authenticate users of a service (smartphone, payment system ...) but also and above all in the current context, to identify people at within a group of individuals physically present or in a photo database, for example. For example, as part of an event.

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The pressure on Amazon had risen a notch the day before, when associations combating racial inequalities urged the firm to stop all technological collaboration with the American police. In their online petition , they accuse the group of "  feeding and profiting from systematic injustice, inequalities and violence against black communities  ".

“  Amazon has long sought to be the technological backbone of the police and the ICE (immigration police, editor's note) by actively promoting Amazon Web Services (cloud), its facial recognition software ( Rekognition ) and its cameras. surveillance (Ring)  ”, according to Athena, a group of associations which question the group on the negative impacts of its various activities.

"  We advocate tighter government regulations on the ethical use of facial recognition technologies, and Congress seems ready to take up the challenge,  " said the giant of online business in a statement released on Wednesday.

"  It has taken Amazon two years to get there, but we are pleased that the company has finally recognized the dangers of facial recognition for people of color, as well as in terms of civil rights in general,  " said reacted Nicole Ozer, director of technologies and liberties for a Californian branch of the ACLU, joined by AFP.

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This is nothing short of Amazon * admitting * its technology is a threat to human life, especially to Black and brown people. This will remain the case in one year. That's why we need to ban it. https://t.co/50NYqnlVKJ

Amazon had already recognized last year that, "  like all technologies  ", facial recognition could be "  misused  ". It had assured that its teams provided indications to all the customers of the (software) Rekognition, "understood the police force, on the good manner of using it".

Jeff Bezos' group said the moratorium would not apply to organizations that use Rekognition to rescue victims of human trafficking or find missing children, such as Thorn or the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children .

IBM had taken the lead

IBM stopped facial recognition sales to police.

Amazon stopped facial recognition sales to police.

What is @Microsoft going to do? Https: //t.co/gEpTGSBoRd

Earlier this week, it was the firm IBM which announced that it would suspend the sale of facial recognition software for identification purposes. She declared herself "  opposed to the use of any technology for the purposes of mass surveillance, racial profiling and violations of basic human rights and freedoms  ".

During a speech in Brussels, Sundar Pichai, the boss of Google, had explained in January that Google would not provide a turnkey facial recognition service until rules and safeguards were put in place by the authorities.

with agencies 

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