Amazon will block police indefinitely from using its facial-recognition software
cnn.com
cnn.com
That and given the police are more curtailed into accepting this, the whole criminal world will be less so inclined to follow those rules. After all, it maybe that some criminal organisation may be using this to identify police operatives from a database of cadet photo's. Maybe unlikely but equally, can't say for sure that such things don't already happen already or in the future.
From a PRolitical(sic) aspect, bit of a no-brainier move for Amazon as the negative PR and down-the line blamed for any mistakes and potential ramifications, it's a liability PR nightmare.
That said, if the police are going to do something and can, if not using Amazon, they will just use whoever is open to it or may even develop their own and with something more closed off and accessible for scrutiny - I dare say as proven in the past, certain identification biases may well play out and that is always a worry with facial recognition uses in such delicate area's.
I don't think this would be particularly useful to them. If they already have the photos, it seems trivial to compare them to members of the organization. Unless I'm mistaken, Rekognition doesn't have super-human abilities to identify people in photos, it has super-human abilities to sort through huge numbers of images looking for people. I don't doubt some enterprising soul will find a way to use this for evil, but I don't think that's going to be it.
> That said, if the police are going to do something and can, if not using Amazon, they will just use whoever is open to it or may even develop their own and with something more closed off and accessible for scrutiny - I dare say as proven in the past, certain identification biases may well play out and that is always a worry with facial recognition uses in such delicate area's.
Frankly, I think the more likely outcome is that some enterprising soul starts a company re-selling Amazon services. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Palantir started offering some kind of a thin wrapper around Rekognition.