The Surveillance Machine

Amazon started out selling books online. These days, it’s the largest e-commerce retailer in the world. It makes billions of dollars hosting data “in the cloud.” It even makes TV shows.

What’s less well-known is that Amazon operates a facial recognition service called Rekognition. And American cops are already using it to watch and track U.S. citizens.

The Orlando Police Department and police in Oregon’s Washington County are each leading pilot programs. They’re using Rekognition to run real-time facial recognition across millions of images captured by municipal surveillance systems and cops’ body cameras.

Information is scarce on these projects – partially as a result of non-disclosure agreements the police have entered into with Amazon. But from what we know, Rekognition allows the cops to scan captured images against a database of mugshots.

Speaking of the Orlando pilot project, here’s what Rekognition director Ranju Das told attendees at a conference in Seoul, Korea, earlier this year…

This is an immediate response use case. There are cameras all over the city [of Orlando]. Authorized cameras are streaming the data […]. We analyze that data in real time and search against the collection of faces that they have.

As digital surveillance becomes the norm, you want as little of your personal data out there as possible.