Amazon Is Now A 'Cheap Mass Surveillance' Dealer--It's Selling Facial Recognition To U.S. Cops

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, has been asked to stop selling facial recognition to American cops. Amazon chief Jeff Bezos received a letter Tuesday from the American Civil Liberties Union and its supporters. It demanded he stop selling a little-known service provided by the tech giant to U.S. law enforcement agencies: facial recognition, powered by artificial intelligence. The tool, dubbed Rekognition, can recognize up to 100 people in a single image and is capable of quickly finding faces in databases containing tens of millions of photos. As per Amazon's own description of Rekognition, it "makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications."