The Scary Thing Amazon's Facial Recognition Can Do

In 2017, Amazon officially announced three new features to its "Amazon Rekognition" software package. The software was launched the previous year with the promise to dramatically increase developers' use of machine learning in the analysis of digital images. The new features included "detection and recognition of text in images, real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces, and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos," per the press release. The breadth of the new features demonstrated how far machine learning had come in just a few years, and the release merely touched the surface of the widespread applicability of Amazon's ever-improving software. Describing the technology's immediate impact in the battle to end human trafficking, as well as its use by social media sites such as Pinterest as a way of extracting "rich text" and thereby improving the cataloging of users' images, Amazon seemed keen to telegraph how widely Rekognition was already used.