On June 21st, an article published in The Wall Street Journal stated that although Amazon CEO Bezos stated that it will boycott government investigators trying to obtain personal information from the company’s production equipment, the company is still Law enforcement agencies, etc. sell face recognition technology, many believe that the use of this technology will threaten personal privacy.
The above article argues that the speed at which some technologies are put into use exceeds the speed at which society and laws set relevant standards and regulations. Face recognition technology is a stark example. The technology allows governments and private companies to track people in places where there are cameras. Even if these people do not carry any equipment. In general, people in public places do not have any legitimate expectations of privacy, they can be photographed, whereabouts can also be recorded.
In view of this, this technology may be more aggressive than phone tracking, and the US Supreme Court will soon rule on its legitimacy. At present, only Texas and Illinois have the ability to use private face tracking technology for private companies in the United States. Restrictions. However, there is no state or federal law in the United States that restricts the use of this technology by law enforcement agencies.
In addition to acts that have been explicitly prohibited by law, the user agreement of the Amazon Rekognition face recognition service platform has hardly prohibited any other behavior. The platform also has no consumer-approved procedures: anyone with a credit card and an Amazon Web Services account can Have access to the platform.
In 2016, Amazon launched Rekognition as part of the Amazon Web Services cloud business. The technology is essentially a matching algorithm that users can use to teach the service to identify individuals from the crowd by tagging images stored on their servers. Facial recognition technology can scan other photos and videos to detect specific individuals. The accuracy of face recognition usually depends on the quality of uploaded and tagged images and videos, and the more data collected, the more mature the technology.
Companies including technology companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have been developing facial recognition technology. Other companies use the technology as part of their social media, photo storage or other services.
Whether it's everything from doorbells to self-driving cars, or from daycare to school, high-definition webcams connected via the Internet are becoming ubiquitous. There is no practical application of face recognition technology. Reports, but companies such as FaceFirst, which has been selling facial recognition services for security purposes for many years, said Peter Trepp, chief executive of the company, saying that since confidentiality agreements are an industry standard, these companies cannot disclose information about their customers.
In addition to concerns about privacy issues, experts have also questioned the accuracy of the technology. The accuracy of the technology may vary by gender and ethnicity.
Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, studied deviations in face recognition algorithms. She stated that preliminary research on the Amazon Rekognition system found that face recognition is accurate for women and dark people. The rate is lower than that of males and light-colored races. The worst-biased rate is female dark-colored races. The presence of such deviations in surveillance systems may result in a higher rate of misidentification of certain groups than other populations.
In the material that has been deleted by Amazon, the company promoted in the marketing, Rekognition products can identify people in real time in the video information collected by the police camera.
There is also a company that provides real-time face recognition technology for the police. It is a listed company in Chicago, Motorola Solutions, which survived the spin-off of the former Motorola giant's Motorola handset division in 2011. Working with the artificial intelligence company Neurala, the police used the camera to identify the face. A spokesperson stated that Motorola Solutions also used Amazon's Rekognition technology in its prototype.
At present, even some Amazon investors have come to the side with the civil rights organization to pressure the Amazon not to sell face recognition technology to law enforcement agencies.
Microsoft was pushed to the cusp of public opinion this week because it was discovered that the company announced in its promotional materials in January this year that Microsoft sold cloud computing services to US immigration and customs enforcement agencies. This technology includes 'can be used to enhance face recognition and Certified In-depth Learning Capabilities'. Some Microsoft employees are also calling for the company to end its partnership with US immigration and customs enforcement authorities. Microsoft declined to comment on this.
Google, which is part of the Alphabet Group, recently also faced pressure from the public and its employees, and ultimately decided not to allow its AI technology to be used in military weapons. The Wall Street Journal believes that Amazon, Microsoft and other technology companies will soon make similar Hard decision.