To: Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO
Amazon: Get out of the surveillance business.
Get out of the business of providing Rekognition face recognition to law enforcement. You're powering dangerous surveillance that threatens our communities. Stop padding your bottom line by selling out our civil rights.
Why is this important?
Amazon is selling a racially biased surveillance tool to law enforcement.
Amazon's surveillance product, Rekognition claims it has the power to identify people in real time, in photos of large groups of people, and in crowded events and public places like protests. But study after study has shown that real time face recognition like this has strong racial biases leading to more erroneous police stops for Black people, women, and young people. With built-in racial bias and no public oversight, this system is guaranteed to harm our communities, ensuring that Black folks get stopped by police more often and put in jail more often.
At a time when our communities are organizing in public at unprecedented levels, and discriminatory policing continues to terrorize us, handing this surveillance technology over to the government threatens our civil rights and liberties.
Facial recognition is not a neutral technology, no matter how Amazon spins this.
Amazon has no business allowing law enforcement to use Rekognition – and powering anti-Black surveillance.
Already, Rekognition is in use in Florida and Oregon. Government agencies in California and Arizona have sought information about it, too. And Amazon didn't just sell Rekognition to law enforcement, it's actively partnering with them to ensure that authorities can fully utilize Rekognition's capabilities.
Amazon has branded itself as customer-centric, opposed secret government surveillance, and has a CEO who publicly supported First Amendment freedoms and spoke out against the discriminatory Muslim Ban. Yet, Amazon is powering dangerous surveillance that poses a grave threat to customers and communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate.
We must make it clear to Amazon that we won't stand by and let it pad its bottom line by selling out our civil rights.
Amazon's surveillance product, Rekognition claims it has the power to identify people in real time, in photos of large groups of people, and in crowded events and public places like protests. But study after study has shown that real time face recognition like this has strong racial biases leading to more erroneous police stops for Black people, women, and young people. With built-in racial bias and no public oversight, this system is guaranteed to harm our communities, ensuring that Black folks get stopped by police more often and put in jail more often.
At a time when our communities are organizing in public at unprecedented levels, and discriminatory policing continues to terrorize us, handing this surveillance technology over to the government threatens our civil rights and liberties.
Facial recognition is not a neutral technology, no matter how Amazon spins this.
Amazon has no business allowing law enforcement to use Rekognition – and powering anti-Black surveillance.
Already, Rekognition is in use in Florida and Oregon. Government agencies in California and Arizona have sought information about it, too. And Amazon didn't just sell Rekognition to law enforcement, it's actively partnering with them to ensure that authorities can fully utilize Rekognition's capabilities.
Amazon has branded itself as customer-centric, opposed secret government surveillance, and has a CEO who publicly supported First Amendment freedoms and spoke out against the discriminatory Muslim Ban. Yet, Amazon is powering dangerous surveillance that poses a grave threat to customers and communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate.
We must make it clear to Amazon that we won't stand by and let it pad its bottom line by selling out our civil rights.