Amazon, a leading purveyor of face recognition software, has backed calls for technology to be regulated.
Face palm: Amazon has come in for criticism for supplying the technology to police. Last year the American Civil Liberties Union also published a study suggesting that the company’s cloud software, called Rekognition, is racially biased. In the ACLU’s test, the tech falsely matched members of Congress with a database of criminal mug shots, with a disporoportionate number of the mismatches being people of color.
Government oversight: In a blog post today, Michael Punke, Amazon’s vice president of global policy, defended the reliability of the company’s technology, but he also said: “We support the calls for an appropriate national legislative framework that protects individual civil rights and ensures that governments are transparent in their use of facial recognition technology.”
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