The web giant’s Rekognition service is one of the most powerful facial recognition tools available. Last year, Amazon signed a one-year moratorium that banned its use by police departments following a string of cases where facial recognition services – from various providers – were found to be inaccurate and/or misused by law enforcement.

Amazon has now extended its ban indefinitely.

Facial recognition services have already led to wrongful arrests that disproportionally impacted marginalised communities.

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint against the Detroit police after black male Robert Williams was arrested on his front lawn “as his wife Melissa looked on and as his daughters wept from the trauma” following a misidentification by a facial recognition system.

Williams was held in a “crowded and filthy” cell overnight without being given any reason before being released on a cold and rainy January night where he was forced to wait outside on the curb for approximately an hour while his wife scrambled to find childcare so that she could come and pick him up.

“Facial recognition is inherently dangerous and inherently oppressive. It cannot be reformed or regulated. It must be abolished,” said Evan Greer, Deputy Director of digital rights group Fight for the Future.

Clearview AI – a controversial facial recognition provider that scrapes data about people from across the web and is used by approximately 2,400 agencies across the US alone – boasted in January that police use of its system jumped 26 percent following the Capitol raid.

Last year, the UK and Australia launched a joint probe into Clearview AI’s practices. Clearview AI was also forced to suspend operations in Canada after the federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada opened an investigation into the company.

Many states, countries, and even some police departments are taking matters into their own hands and banning the use of facial recognition by law enforcement. Various rights groups continue to apply pressure and call for more to follow.

Human rights group Liberty won the first international case banning the use of facial recognition technology for policing in August last year. Liberty launched the case on behalf of Cardiff, Wales resident Ed Bridges who was scanned by the technology first on a busy high street in December 2017 and again when he was at a protest in March 2018.

Following the case, the Court of Appeal ruled that South Wales Police’s use of facial recognition technology breaches privacy rights, data protection laws, and equality laws. South Wales Police had used facial recognition technology around 70 times – with around 500,000 people estimated to have been scanned by May 2019 – but must now halt its use entirely.

Facial recognition tests in the UK so far have been nothing short of a complete failure. An initial trial at the 2016 Notting Hill Carnival led to not a single person being identified. A follow-up trial the following year led to no legitimate matches, but 35 false positives.

A 2019 independent report into the Met Police’s facial recognition trials concluded that it was only verifiably accurate in just 19 percent of cases.

(Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash)

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Rekognition was called out by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for erroneously labelling those with darker skin tones as criminals more often in a test using a database of mugshots.

Jacob Snow, Technology and Civil Liberties Attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said:

“Face surveillance will be used to power discriminatory surveillance and policing that targets communities of colour, immigrants, and activists. Once unleashed, that damage can’t be undone.”

Amazon disputed the methodology used by the ACLU claiming the default ‘confidence’ setting of 80 percent was left on when it suggests at least 95 percent for law enforcement purposes.

Orlando Police was using Rekognition to automatically detect suspected criminals in live footage taken by surveillance cameras. Despite help from Amazon, the police spent 15 months failing to get it to work properly.

“We haven’t even established a stream today,” the city’s chief information officer Rosa Akhtarkhavari told the Orlando Weekly. “We’re talking about more than a year later. We have not, today, established a reliable stream.”

Employees of Amazon recently wrote a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos expressing their concerns over the sale of facial recognition software and other services to US government bodies such as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

In their letter, the Amazonians wrote:

“We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights. As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build and a say in how it is used.”

Orlando Police has now cancelled its contract with Amazon. The news will be of some relief to those concerned about the privacy implications of such big brother-like systems.

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Michael Punke, VP of Global Public Policy at Amazon Web Services, said.

“Over the past several months, we’ve talked to customers, researchers, academics, policymakers, and others to understand how to best balance the benefits of facial recognition with the potential risks.

It’s critical that any legislation protect civil rights while also allowing for continued innovation and practical application of the technology.”

In a blog post today, Amazon highlighted five guidelines to ensure facial recognition is developed and used ethically.

The first of the five calls for facial recognition to follow existing laws which protect civil liberties. To ensure accountability, the second guideline wants all facial recognition to be reviewed by humans before any decision is taken.

Other guidelines include a call for transparancy in how agencies are using facial recognition technology, and visual notices placed where it’s being used in public or commercial settings.

Facial Recognition Concerns

The company has faced criticism of its ‘Rekognition’ system which is used by police forces and has been pitched to agencies such as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In a letter addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, employees wrote:

“We refuse to build the platform that powers ICE, and we refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.

As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build and a say in how it is used.”

The letter was sent following ICE’s separation of immigrant children from their families at the US border and subsequent detainment. There’s no evidence ICE ultimately purchased or used Amazon’s technology.

In July last year, the American Civil Liberties Union tested Amazon’s facial recognition technology on members of Congress to see if they match with a database of criminal mugshots.

Rekognition compared pictures of all members of the House and Senate against 25,000 arrest photos. The false matches disproportionately affected members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Dr Matt Wood, General Manager of AI at Amazon Web Services, commented on the ACLU’s findings later that month. He said the ACLU left Rekognition’s default confidence setting of 80 percent on when it suggests 95 percent or higher for law enforcement.

Wood, however, went on to say it showed how standards are needed to ensure facial recognition systems are used properly. He called for “the government to weigh in and specify what temperature (or confidence levels) it wants law enforcement agencies to meet to assist in their public safety work.”

The call for facial recognition standards extends beyond the US. In China, the CEO of SenseTime – the world’s most funded AI startup – also said he wants to see facial recognition standards established for a ‘healthier’ industry.

In the UK, Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham announced her office has identified facial recognition technology as a priority to establish what protections are needed for the public.

SenseTime is so well-funded not just because of its powerful facial recognition technology, but also from adoption by the Chinese government. The firm aims to process and analyse over 100,000 simultaneous real-time streams from traffic cameras, ATMs, and more as part of its ‘Viper’ system.

If such a system was deployed with biased algorithms, it will exacerbate current societal problems. Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini gave a fantastic presentation during the World Economic Forum last month on the need to fight AI bias.

As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben would say: “With great power, comes great responsibility”.

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Dr. Matt Wood, GM of Deep Learning and AI at Amazon Web Services, made the suggestion in a blog post responding to the ACLU’s (American Civil Liberties Union) findings of a racial bias in the ‘Rekognition’ facial recognition algorithm by Amazon.

In their findings, the ACLU found Rekognition erroneously labelled those with darker skin colours as criminals more often when members of Congress were matched against a database of 25,000 arrest photos.

Amazon argued the ACLU left Rekognition’s default confidence setting of 80 percent on when it suggests 95 percent or higher for law enforcement.

Commenting on the ACLU’s findings, Wood wrote:

“The default confidence threshold for facial recognition APIs in Rekognition is 80%, which is good for a broad set of general use cases (such as identifying celebrities on social media or family members who look alike in photos apps), but it’s not the right setting for public safety use cases.

The 80% confidence threshold used by the ACLU is far too low to ensure the accurate identification of individuals; we would expect to see false positives at this level of confidence.”

Wood provided a case example of their own test where – using a dataset of over 850,000 faces commonly used in academia – the company searched against public photos of all members of US Congress ‘in a similar way’ to the ACLU.

Using the 99 percent confidence threshold, the misidentification rate dropped to zero despite comparing against a larger number of faces (30x larger than the ACLU test).

Amazon is naturally keen to highlight the positive uses its technology has been used for. The company says it’s been used for things such as fighting human trafficking and reuniting lost children with their families.

However, the ACLU’s test shows the potential for the technology to be misused to disastrous effect. Without oversight, civil liberties could be impacted and lead to increased persecution of minorities.

To help prevent this from happening, Wood calls it “a very reasonable idea” for “the government to weigh in and specify what temperature (or confidence levels) it wants law enforcement agencies to meet to assist in their public safety work.”

A 2010 study by researchers at NIST and the University of Texas in Dallas found that algorithms designed and tested in East Asia are better at recognising East Asians, while those designed in Western countries are more accurate at detecting Caucasians.

When a clear bias problem remains in AI algorithms, it’s little wonder there’s concern about the use of inaccurate facial recognition for things such as police body cams.

Should a minimum confidence level be set for law enforcement? Let us know in the comments.

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