Amazon's facial recognition identified lawmakers as lawbreakers

The ACLU put Amazon's Rekognition facial scanning software to the test and the results were more than a little troubling. Comparing "every current member of the House and Senate" against a database of 25,000 publicly available mugshots, Amazon's software identified 28 lawmakers as folks who'd been arrested for a crime. Given what we've seen about facial recognition's shortcomings, especially in regards to people of color, the following might not be all that surprising: The false matches included six members of the Congressional Black Caucus. "Nearly 40 percent of Rekognition's false matches were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress," according to the ACLU. We've already seen how the public has reacted to Amazon's face-scanning tech.