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.

It was not too long ago that biometric identification methods became accepted means to authenticate a customer's identity in the financial services sector. First fingerprints became commonplace, followed by voice recognition tech. Now, facial recognition tech is becoming increasingly accepted by financial institutions, notoriously some of the hardest (and slowest) organizations to approve of new procedures, due to their tight enforcement protocols. If banks in Southeast Asia are accepting facial biometric IDs, then it's a good bet that industries that don't have such stringent standards will start looking at the technology as a means of authenticating identity, too. Facial rec software applies artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies to match a face captured on-camera against a database of millions of faces, and is usually used to identify or authorize access for an individual.

A false facial recognition match has led to the arrest of another innocent person. According to the Detroit Free Press, police in the city arrested a man for allegedly reaching into a person's car, taking their phone and throwing it, breaking the case and damaging the screen in the process. Facial recognition flagged Michael Oliver as a possible suspect, and the victim identified him in a photo lineup as the person who damaged their phone. Oliver was charged with a felony count of larceny over the May 2019 incident. He said he didn't commit the crime and the evidence supported his claim.

Recognition Tech: New A.I can match Face to Body A Japanese company has developed a system that would be able to identify a person even if they aren't directly facing the camera, according to New Atlas. Recognition Tech: New A.I can match Face to Body

Automated facial recognition systems from Japanese biz NEC will be used on staffers and athletes at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The technology – which is not without its detractors in the UK – was demonstrated at a media event in the city today. It will require athletes, staff, volunteers and the press to submit their photographs before the games start. These will then be linked up to IC chips in their passes and combined with scanners on entry to allow them access to more than 40 facilities. Tsuyoshi Iwashita, head of security for the games, said the aim was to reduce pressure on entry points and shorten queueing time for this group of people.

As image recognition advances continue to accelerate, startups with a mind towards security applications are seeing some major interest to turn surveillance systems more intelligent. AnyVision is working on face, body and object recognition tech and the underlying system infrastructure to help companies deploy smart cameras for various purposes. "It's not just how accurate the system is, it's also how much it scales," Etshtein tells TechCrunch. "You can put more than 20 concurrent full HD camera streams on a single GPU." The Tel Aviv-based AI startup announced today that it has closed a $28 million Series A funding round led by Bosch.

Facial recognition tech is becoming more sophisticated, with some firms claiming it can even read our emotions and detect suspicious behaviour. But what implications does this have for privacy and civil liberties? Facial recognition tech has been around for decades, but it has been progressing in leaps and bounds in recent years due to advances in computing vision and artificial intelligence (AI), tech experts say. It is now being used to identify people at borders, unlock smart phones, spot criminals, and authenticate banking transactions. But some tech firms are claiming it can also assess our emotional state.

Police in southeast China have reportedly arrested a fugitive spotted in a crowd of 50,000 people attending a pop concert thanks to some eerily accurate facial recognition technology. According to local reports, the man was arrested while attending a show by Hong Kong singer Jacky Cheung in the Nanchang, Jiangxi province. The man's full name hasn't been released but he is described in reports by his family name, Ao. "Ao was suspected to be involved in an economic crime and was listed on a national online system," police officer Li Jin is quoted as saying. "He was very shocked and had a blank face when we caught him." Ao had reportedly thought that he was safe to attend the crowded event because he considered that there was minimal chance that he would be identified in such a large group of people.

Facebook is notifying more users of its facial recognition features as it faces increased scrutiny over how the technology may infringe upon their privacy. Many users who logged onto Facebook on Tuesday reported seeing a message from the firm on their News Feed outlining several new facial recognition features. Facebook now notifies users when someone uploads a picture of them that they haven't been tagged in, among other features. Facebook notified some users on their News Feeds of the firm's new facial recognition technology. The features tell users when a photo of them has been uploaded to Facebook that they haven't been tagged in yet and if a stranger uses a photo of them as their profile picture The features were first announced last December, but Facebook has been gradually rolling them out over the past several months.

Alexa and Google Assistant are appearing on what seems like every single gadget at CES 2018, but Cortana's absence from the party has made it the butt of jokes. Luckily, Qualcomm has announced that it's Smart Audio Platform, which includes microphone, speaker and voice recognition tech, now supports Cortana. That will make it a lot easier for smart speaker manufacturers to build devices around the neglected bot, instead of Google and Amazon's more popular platforms. Microsoft's Cortana has recently landed on Harmon Kardon's Invoke speakers (below) and its own Cortana thermostat. Apart from those wins, however, it's getting badly beaten in its race with Amazon and Google to get voice AI onto gadgets.