An ex-employee has accused Amazon of breaching UK sanctions by selling facial recognition technology to Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine, The Financial Times reported. Charles Forrest alleged that he was unfairly dismissed in 2023 after accusing Amazon of wrongdoing on a number of issues between November 2022 and May 2023, according to the article. The allegations were presented to a London employment tribunal as part of a hearing this week. Forrest said that Amazon closed a deal with Russian firm VisionLabs to provide access to its Rekognition facial recognition technology. It did that "through what appears to be a shell company based in the Netherlands," according to the tribunal filings.

China's cyberspace regulator said it has issued draft rules to oversee the security management of facial recognition technology in the country, following concerns raised in public about the overuse of the technology. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said on Tuesday that facial recognition technology can only be used to process facial information when there is a specific purpose and sufficient necessity as well as with strict protective measures. The use of the technology will also require an individual's consent, the CAC said in a statement. It added that non-biometric identification solutions should be favoured over facial recognition in cases where such methods are equally effective. Biometric identification, especially facial recognition, has become widespread in China.

When Microsoft announced last week it will remove several features from its facial recognition technology that deal with emotion, the head of its responsible artificial intelligence efforts included a warning: The science of emotion is far from settled. "Experts inside and outside the company have highlighted the lack of scientific consensus on the definition of'emotions,' the challenges in how inferences generalize across use cases, regions, and demographics, and the heightened privacy concerns around this type of capability," Natasha Crampton, Microsoft's chief responsible AI officer, wrote in a blog post. Microsoft's move, which came as part of a broader announcement about its "Responsible AI Standard" initiative, immediately became the most high-profile example of a company moving away from emotion recognition AI, a relatively small piece of technology that has been the focus of intense criticism, particularly in the academic community. Emotion recognition technology typically relies on software to look at any number of qualities -- facial expressions, tone of voice or word choice -- in an effort to automatically detect emotional state. Many technology companies have released software that claims to be able to read, recognize or measure emotions for use in business, education and customer service.

When the Russian warship Moskva sank in the Black Sea south of Ukraine, some 500 crew members were reportedly on board. The Russian state held a big ceremony for the surviving sailors and officers who were on the ship. But, considering Russia's history of being not exactly truthful when it comes to events like this, many people wondered whether these were actual sailors from Moskva. Toler is director of research and training for Bellingcat, the group that specializes in open-source and social media investigations. He used facial recognition software to identify the men in the video through images in Russian social media, and found that most of the men were indeed sailors from Sevastopol, the town the ship was operating out of.

AI-enabled cameras capture schoolchildren in China's Xinjiang region. Cameras identify and track ... [ ] Uighurs and other ethnic minorities face in the heavily-policed region. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key technologies of the future – and not just because of civilian applications like ecommerce, self-driving cars, and online search and personal assistants. AI will transform militaries through innovations in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, logistics, command and control capabilities, weapons systems, and so on. Last year a landmark U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) report found, "The ability of a machine to perceive, evaluate, and act more quickly and accurately than a human represents a competitive advantage in any field--civilian or military."

But when the technology is used to identify suspects in criminal cases, those flaws in the system can have catastrophic, life-changing consequences. People can be wrongly identified, arrested, and convicted, often without ever being told they were ID'd by a computer. It's especially troubling when you consider false identifications disproportionately affect women, young people, and people with dark skin--basically everyone other than white men. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Khari Johnson joins us to talk about the limits of facial recognition tech, and what happens to the people who get misidentified.

But when the technology is used to identify suspects in criminal cases, those flaws in the system can have catastrophic, life-changing consequences. People can get wrongly identified, arrested, and convicted, often without ever being told they were ID'd by a computer. It's especially troubling when you consider false identifications disproportionately affect women, young people, and people with dark skin--basically everyone other than white men. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Khari Johnson joins us to talk about the limits of facial recognition tech, and what happens to the people who get misidentified.

Ukraine is now using Clearview AI's facial recognition technology for purposes such as identifying Russian soldiers, its CEO claimed. Hoan Ton-That told Reuters the company offered Ukraine's defense ministry free access to its system following the invasion by Russia. According to the report, Clearview suggested Ukraine could use the tech to reunite refugees with family members, fight misinformation, assess at checkpoints whether someone is a person of interest and to identify dead bodies. The company hasn't offered its technology to Russia. Engadget has contacted the defense ministry for comment.

In April 2018, Bronx public defender Kaitlin Jackson was assigned to represent a man accused of stealing a pair of socks from a TJ Maxx store. The man said he couldn't have stolen the socks because at the time the theft occurred, he was at a hospital about three-quarters of a mile away, where his son was born about an hour later. Jackson couldn't understand how police had identified and arrested her client months after the theft. She called the Bronx District Attorney's Office, and a prosecutor told her police had identified her client from a security camera photo using facial recognition. A security guard at the store, the only witness to the theft, later told an investigator from her office that police had sent him a mugshot of her client and asked in a text message "Is this the guy?" Jackson calls that tactic "as suggestive as you can get."

Four Democratic senators and House representatives have called on several government departments to stop using Clearview AI's facial recognition system. The Government Accountability Office said in August that the Departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security and the Interior were all using the contentious technology for "domestic law enforcement." Pramila Jayapal and Ayanna Pressley urged the agencies to refrain from using Clearview's products and other facial recognition tools. "Clearview AI's technology could eliminate public anonymity in the United States," the lawmakers wrote to the agencies in their letters, which were obtained by The Verge. They said that, combined with the facial recognition system, the database of billions of photos Clearview scraped from social media platforms "is capable of fundamentally dismantling Americans' expectation that they can move, assemble or simply appear in public without being identified."