These are just some of the questions being raised by lawmakers, civil libertarians, and privacy advocates in the wake of an ACLU report released last summer that claimed Amazon's facial recognition software, Rekognition, misidentified 28 members of congress as criminals. Rekognition is a general-purpose, application programming interface (API) developers can use to build applications that can detect and analyze scenes, objects, faces, and other items within images. The source of the controversy was a pilot program in which Amazon teamed up with the police departments of two cities, Orlando, Florida and Washington County, Oregon, to explore the use of facial recognition in law enforcement. In January 2019, the Daily Mail reported that the FBI has been testing Rekognition since early 2018. The Project on Government Oversight also revealed via a Freedom of Information Act request that Amazon had also pitched Rekognition to ICE in June 2018.

In Washington County, Oregon, sheriff's deputies use a mobile app to send photos of suspects to Amazon's cloud computing service. The e-commerce giant's algorithms check those faces against a database of tens of thousands of mugshots, using Amazon's Rekognition image analysis service. Such use of facial recognition by law enforcement is essentially unregulated. But some developers of the technology want to change that. In a blog post Thursday, Amazon asked Congress to put some rules around the use of the technology, echoing a call by Microsoft in December.

Amazon's online facial recognition system incorrectly matched pictures of US Congress members to mugshots of suspected criminals in a study by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU, a nonprofit headquartered in New York, has called for Congress to ban cops and Feds from using any sort of computer-powered facial recognition technology due to the fact that, well, it sucks. Amazon's AI-powered Rekognition service was previously criticized by the ACLU when it revealed the web giant was aggressively marketing its face-matching tech to police in Washington County, Oregon, and Orlando, Florida. Rekognition is touted by the Bezos Bunch as, among other applications, a way to identify people in real time from surveillance camera footage or from officers' body cameras. The results from the ACLU's latest probing showed that Rekognition mistook images of 28 members of Congress for mugshots of cuffed people suspected of crimes.

If you're nervous about the privacy implications of Amazon's camera technology, there might be a good reason for it. The ACLU and a coalition of civil rights groups are calling on Amazon chief Jeff Bezos to stop offering Rekognition facial detection system to government customers after learning that the company is actively helping law enforcement implement the potentially invasive technology. Police in multiple regions have partnered with Amazon on surveillance projects, including an Orlando proof-of-concept that lets Amazon search for "people of interest" through city cameras as well a Washington County, Oregon initiative that lets officers scan people to see if they turn up in a mugshot database. The ACLU also learned that Amazon provided Washington County a roadmap under a non-disclosure agreement, and offered to link the county to other government customers interested in Rekognition, such as a body camera manufacturer. That's particularly problematic when facial recognition on body cameras is illegal in Oregon.