The North Carolina Civil Liberties Union has obtained documents that show Amazon has been nearly giving away facial recognition tools to police departments in Oregon and Orlando, in an effort to basically beta test the tools, which live in the cloud via Amazon Web Services. The package is called Rekognition, and has been deployed in some capacity — including alpha and beta testing — since late 2016.

Today, a coalition of civil rights groups has jointly signed a letter that calls for Amazon to stop selling this technology. Why? The letter opens with:

"The undersigned coalition of organizations are dedicated to protecting civil rights and liberties and safeguarding communities. "

And in a separate petition, the ACLU states: “Facial recognition is not a neutral technology, no matter how Amazon spins this. It automates mass surveillance, threatens people's freedom to live their private lives outside the government's gaze, and is primed to amplify bias and inequality in the criminal justice system.”

In response, an Amazon spokesperson pointed out that there are some upsides to such facial recognition technology, including finding lost children at amusement parks, as well as locating people who have been abducted.

Of course, the problem is that these can also be used for nefarious purposes, such as tracking political protesters, members of activist groups such as Black Lives Matter activists, and immigrants, and simply spying on neighborhoods with no reasonable suspicion established to do so.

see it here & link to amazon product

http://bigthink.com/brandon-weber/yikes-amazon-is-now-selling-facial-recognition-technology-to-police?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigthink%2Fmain+%28Big+Think+Main%29