AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Jay Greene 

Amazon.com Inc. found itself thrust into the contentious issue of government surveillance on Tuesday after dozens of civil-rights organizations called on the tech giant to stop selling its facial-recognition technology to law-enforcement organizations.

The retail giant has been selling the technology as a means to help authorities identify suspects in surveillance footage, according to documents the American Civil Liberties Union obtained from police departments through public-records requests.

The uproar comes amid increasing concerns world-wide about the extensive reach of powerful tech companies, the massive quantities of information they collect and analyze, and the potential for abuse of people's privacy and data.

The ACLU and other civil-rights organizations sent a letter to Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos expressing "profound concerns" about the potential misuse of the technology, which Amazon calls Rekognition.

"We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure that poses a grave threat to customers and communities across the country," the groups wrote in the letter.

Amazon didn't directly comment on law enforcement's use of Rekognition, saying the company requires customers to "comply with the law and be responsible" when they use its services. It cited positive uses of the technology, such as helping amusement parks find lost children.

"Our quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology," the company said in a statement.

Other technology companies also work with U.S. police departments to apply facial-recognition technology to video surveillance and body cameras footage. Motorola Solutions Inc., for example, is working with the artificial-intelligence startup Neurala Inc. to make body cameras that learn to identify a suspect or a missing child and spot them in crowds.

Amazon introduced Rekognition in 2016 as part of its Amazon Web Services cloud business. The technology is essentially a matching algorithm, where customers can teach the service to pick out individuals by tagging images stored on its servers. Its facial-recognition technology can then scan other photos and videos to detect specific people.

The accuracy of facial recognition generally depends on the quality of the images and video uploaded and tagged, and the technology gets better as it collects more data.

Facial recognition has long been developed by tech companies including Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others as part of their social media, photo storage or other services.

Civil-rights advocates are worried about growing state surveillance. China, for example, has expanded the use of facial recognition, recently capturing three suspects who were attending concerts.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon, one of the law-enforcements agencies named by the ACLU, said it has used Rekognition for a year. It uses the technology to compare images from its inmate photo database to suspects in crimes, said Jeff Talbot, a deputy and spokesman for the agency.

The sheriff's office has caught "multiple people" using the technology, identifying suspects from store videos as well as from photos supplied by alleged victims, he said.

"It's not mass surveillance. It's not real-time surveillance," Mr. Talbot said.

The civil-rights groups are concerned about the misuse of police body cameras and other surveillance video and photos to keep track of any person's every move. They specifically mentioned immigrants and political protesters as potential targets.

The ACLU cited emails between Amazon employees and law-enforcement agencies promoting Rekognition's abilities to identify up to 100 people in a single image, and track people in real time in streaming video of crowds and public places.

"People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government," the groups wrote.

Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 22, 2018 18:00 ET (22:00 GMT)

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