AI professionals desire Amazon to stop offering facial acknowledgment tech to authorities

Amazon’s facial acknowledgment tech is once again under fire. AI professionals on Wednesday drew attention to a motion requiring Amazon to stop offering its facial acknowledgment software application, called Rekognition, to police.

So far, 27 scientists have actually signed an open letter, released March 26, slamming Amazon for ignoring other scientists’ research studies into its Rekognition software application. The group is likewise requiring that Amazon stop sales of the software application to authorities. 

The signers consisted of researchers from universities, Google and Facebook, along with AI researchers like Yoshua Bengio, a winner this year of the prominent Turing Award.

“We hope that the company will instead thoroughly examine all of its products and question whether they should currently be used by police,” composed the scientists in the letter. “We call on Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement as such legislation and safeguards are not in place.”

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The open letter came after Amazon’s Matthew Wood and Michael Punke wrote several blog posts “attempting to refute the results” of a study conducted by Inioluwa Deborah Raji and Joy Buolamwini, according to the letter. The earlier study said Amazon’s Rekognition program has much higher error rates when it’s trying to recognize the gender of darker skinned women than lighter skinned man.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The American Civil Liberties Union also released a statement supporting the researchers.

“Face surveillance gives governments unprecedented power to track, control, and harm all people, but especially communities of color, immigrants, religious minorities, and others long subject to surveillance abuse,” said Matt Cagle, attorney at the ACLU, said in an emailed statement. “Companies seeking to profit off this menacing technology cannot ignore and outsource responsibility for the harms of systems they build. They must stop selling face surveillance to governments entirely.”

Since the ACLU called Amazon out for selling Rekognition to law enforcement last June, the company has been under fire over its facial recognition technology. The e-commerce giant’s shareholders in January demanded the company to stop selling the program to government agencies.