Content warning for mention of possible use of publicly available tracking technology by stalkers and harassers.<\/p>\r\n
The New York Times<\/cite> published an article last week about creating a face-recognition system<\/a> using publicly available camera feeds:<\/p>\r\n To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers\u2019 websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon\u2019s commercial facial recognition service. Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of [\u2026] a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n (They received permission from the professor in question to talk about him in the article.)<\/p>\r\n The article discusses some of the potential for abuse of face-recognition technology by law enforcement:<\/p>\r\n Matt Wood, the general manager of artificial intelligence for Amazon Web Services, noted that it is possible that Rekognition, like other types of information available to law enforcement officials, could be used inappropriately. [\u2026] He added that the company has not received any reports of misuse by law enforcement.<\/p>\r\n In January, however, the A.C.L.U. sent a letter to Amazon asking it to stop selling facial recognition technology to police and government agencies, saying that the company\u2019s attention to civil liberties has lagged behind that of Google and Microsoft.<\/p>\r\n \u201cRekognition marketing materials read like a user manual for authoritarian surveillance,\u201d said Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties director for the A.C.L.U. of California, in a statement last year.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n But the article doesn\u2019t talk about some other aspects of the situation. For example:<\/p>\r\n The problems around law-enforcement access to surveillance and face-recognition systems have been pretty widely recognized for years, and people have taken various approaches to try to avoid being recognized by such systems. Here are a few links on that topic.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
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