Civil liberties groups have urged Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to US police, amid growing unease at the relationship between technology companies and government.
The American Civil Liberties Union said its affiliates in three states had obtained marketing materials and documents for Amazon’s Rekognition service, part of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing business. The company says the software can be used for “real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces, and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos”.
The ACLU and a group of other civil rights organisations sent a letter to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, on Tuesday demanding that the company stop providing facial recognition to government.