ACLU Accuses Amazon Rekognition of Racial Bias After Lawmaker Mismatches

Amazon’s facial identification product Rekognition falsely matched 28 members of Congress with criminal mug shots, and lawmakers of color were disproportionately mismatched, said the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Thursday. They included six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which recently wrote CEO Jeff Bezos. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., was misidentified in a database of 25,000 public arrest photos. “Congress should press for a federal moratorium on the use of face surveillance until its harms, particularly to vulnerable communities, are fully considered,” said ACLU Legislative Counsel Neema Singh Guliani. An Amazon spokesperson emailed that the results could probably be improved by following best practices on setting the confidence thresholds used in the test, from 80 percent confidence to 95 percent. “In real world scenarios, Amazon Rekognition is almost exclusively used to help narrow the field and allow humans to expeditiously review and consider options using their judgement [sic] (and not to make fully autonomous decisions), where it can help find lost children, restrict human trafficking, or prevent crimes,” said the spokesperson. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Reps. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., wrote Bezos Thursday on “serious concerns … about the dangers facial recognition can pose to privacy and civil rights, especially when it is used as a tool of government surveillance.”