The Vox article “Jeff Bezos says Amazon is writing its own facial recognition laws to pitch to lawmakers” talks about Jeff Bezos and Amazon drafting regulations for facial recognition technology, that they hope to be adopted by U.S. Lawmakers. The article states that this move comes after Amazon got in for their facial recognition technology “Amazon Recognition”, launched earlier this year.
It also talks about what “Amazon Recognition” is and how the tech came under scrutiny. The software is designed to match pictures of faces with other databases of facial pictures in real time. This caused outrage because when the ACLU used pictures of congressmen and matched them with a database of mugshots, it good 28 matches, all of them false and most of them involving congressmen of color.
The article does a good job explaining the topic objectively and reporting on what happened before the particular news and what significance all of this has. The article targets readers that are interested in how the tech world is changing as well as people that are concerned with privacy and surveillance.
What’s scary about this article is that it doesn’t even question the idea of a corporation writing legislation that could eventually be used to regulate that industry.
The ACLU gets it:
“In a statement, ACLU Northern CA Attorney Jacob Snow said:
“It’s a welcome sign that Amazon is finally acknowledging the dangers of face surveillance. But we’ve seen this playbook before. Once companies realize that people are demanding strong privacy protections, they sweep in, pushing weak rules that won’t protect consumer privacy and rights. Cities across the country are voting to ban face surveillance, while Amazon is pushing its surveillance tech deeper into communities.”