Amazon challenges ACLU study on facial recognition tech and police

Amazon defended the law enforcement use cases for its facial recognition technology Friday in an effort to throw water on fears raised by civil rights activists. Matt Wood, a leader on the Amazon Web Services machine learning team, published a blog post in response to criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups, which have been demanding the company stop selling its Rekognition software to police. In the post, Wood cautions that we "should not throw away the oven because the temperature could be set wrong and burn the pizza." Wood expressed skepticism about an experiment the ACLU conducted using Rekognition to compare headshots of the members of Congress with a database of 25,000 mugshots. The test set Rekognition to make matches with an 80 percent confidence rating, according to Amazon.