Amazon face recognition falsely matches 28 lawmakers with mugshots, ACLU says

Amazon’s facial recognition technology falsely identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been arrested for crimes, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU of Northern California’s test of Amazon’s controversial Rekognition software also found that people of color were disproportionately misidentified in a mugshot database, raising new concerns about racial bias and the potential for abuse by law enforcement.

The report followed revelations in May that Amazon has been marketing and selling the Rekognition technology to police agencies, leading privacy advocates to urge CEO Jeff Bezos to stop providing the product to the government.

“Our test reinforces that face surveillance is not safe for government use,” Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, said in a statement. “Face surveillance will be used to power discriminatory surveillance and policing that targets communities of color, immigrants, and activists. Once unleashed, that damage can’t be undone.”

The ACLU used the same facial recognition system that Amazon offers to the public, scanning for matches between images of faces. The group built a face database and search tool using 25,000 public arrest photos, then cross-referenced that data with public photos of every member of the US House and Senate.