Friday, June 12, 2020

Police Use of Facial Recognition banned by Amazon


On June 11, 2020, the E-Commerce giant Amazon banned the use of its software “Rekognition” by the police. The software used to quickly compare a picture with the police data bases that holds hundreds of 1000s of photos.

Why the ban?

  • The facial recognition technology has been criticized over some time. 
  • This is mainly because, most of the algorithms of the Rekognition software are more likely to wrongly identify the faces of black people than those of white people.

Recognition

  • The Amazon Rekognition software was launched in 2016. 
  • It was sold and used by a number of US government agencies.

What is the controversy?

  • The Gender Identification technology of Rekognition software identifies faces as only male and female. 
  • There is no category for nonbinary gender. 
  • According to MIT researchers, the errors in the face recognition system is more. 
  • Though it is reducing year after year, the performance of the software on female faces were less accurate than that of male faces.

No comments:

Post a Comment