Amazon Is Working With Police to Provide Facial Recognition Surveillance

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Remember when Amazon mostly just sold books? Since its founding in 1994, the sprawling online marketplace has ballooned into one of the most powerful companies in the world. Now Amazon offers batteries, clothes, milk and eggs, hosting for your website, streaming movies--and now real-time facial recognition powers for police surveillance. In November 2016, Amazon released a new service called Rekognition, which can "process millions of photos a day" to identify people and objects in the images.