With the exception of public figures, they aren’t sharing facial recognition datasets. This is a service that a moderately skilled team could implement with off the shelf and free software or an individual could do with a raspberry pi.
Law enforcement has been doing this for a long time in many areas. If there’s an ethical issue here, it’s with machine learning and camera surveillance in general, not Amazon.
Edit: especially if you run ads about how effective your guns are for serial killing.
By your standard, HN is on the same level as Amazon, as there have been many articles here over the years describing technical details on how to implement such a system available to anyone. A serial killer may be using a raspberry pi based facial recognition system that he learned about here, right now to stalk a victim.
That’s an untenable position.
Amazon's product takes care of all that nitty-gritty, thanks to the work of their many bright employees.
For implementing facial recognition, yeah, it takes a little bit of coding skill. Same as integrating with Rekognition.