Employees, ACLU demand Amazon stop facilitating government surveillance

Instead of merely selling copies of 1984, Amazon appears determined to help bring the dystopian classic's vision of widespread government surveillance to life. And Amazon employees are really not happy about it. In 2016, Amazon unveiled Rekognition, an AI-powered facial recognition software that scans videos or photos to detect people or objects. It can analyze a person's face to determine their emotions, identify 100 faces in a single photo, and track a person throughout a video even if they leave and reenter the field of view. In other words, it's a powerful surveillance tool, and government agencies and law enforcement are apparently two of Amazon's target customers.