During a company-wide meeting today, Amazon addressed its relationship with law enforcement agencies, including Immigrations Customs and Enforcement—its first direct response to employee concerns raised in June about the company’s often successful attempts to provide cloud infrastructure and facial recognition…
Earlier this year, Amazon’s facial recognition tech Rekognition—which can scan photos and videos and match them against databases of faces—faced a flood of criticism from Amazon employees, shareholders, and civil rights activists who argued that its use by government agencies was unethical or even dangerous. That…
In August, federal agents in Ohio made a suspect unlock his iPhone X using his face, in what may be the first instance of law enforcement using such a tactic.
As companies race to employ facial recognition everywhere from major league ballparks to your local school and summer camp, we face tough questions about the technology’s potential to intensify racial bias; Commercial face recognition software has repeatedly been shown to be less accurate on people with darker skin,…
British police have reportedly identified two suspects in the nerve agent poisonings that left one person dead and three others injured. The suspects were identified after UK police combed through “months” of surveillance footage at British airports, as well as security camera footage from around Salisbury.
This week, some passengers traveling through the international airport in Sydney, Australia will be the first guinea pigs in a program that intends to replace the passport with facial scans. The check-in process may surely become less of a headache, but at what price?
Law enforcement officers in Maryland used facial recognition technology to identify the suspected shooter believed to be responsible for killing five staff members and injuring at least two others in the offices of newspaper company Capital Gazette on Thursday.
In a self-congratulatory move, Microsoft announced some major improvements today to its fundamentally biased facial recognition software. The Azure-based Face API was criticized in a research paper earlier this year for its error rate—as high as 20.8 percent—when attempting to identify the gender of people of color,…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella downplayed his company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a company-wide email sent this evening, saying that Microsoft’s contract with ICE deals only with email, calendar, and messaging—not with separating children from their parents.
Tensions are high within Microsoft, as new scrutiny is given to a partnership between the company’s Azure Government cloud computing arm and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to several Microsoft employees who spoke to Gizmodo on the condition of anonymity. Two were considering leaving the…
On Friday, 20 groups of Amazon shareholders sent CEO Jeff Bezos a letter pressuring him to stop selling the company’s face recognition software to law enforcement, CNN reports. Called Rekognition, the software came under greater scrutiny last month when the ACLU published revealing internal documents related to its…
Thousands of attendees of the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff, Wales were mistakenly identified as potential criminals by facial recognition technology used by local law enforcement.
Concerts used to be one of the most analog activities a person could do. But those days are going the way of the paper ticket, and now the gatekeepers of live events are determined to inject some digital anxiety into your drug-fueled Phish party. Ticketmaster is jumping into the facial recognition business
Citizens and visitors to the city of Daye in China’s Hubei province have a new incentive to pay attention to traffic signals: if they don’t, they can get sprayed with water.
It sucks when a new technology comes along and creeps everybody out. It sucks even more when that technology is so good, so life-changing that even the most discerning consumer sets that anxiety aside and says, “Who cares if Apple owns detailed biometric data about my face?” That’s what Face ID has done to me with…
If you’ve seen a lot of people suddenly sharing uncannily similar artistic doppelgängers of themselves recently, Google’s facial recognition abilities and massive database of art are to blame. The tech giant recently recently added a new feature to its Arts and Culture app which allows users to snap a photo and…
Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a new kind of captcha which asks users to prove their identities by uploading photos of their faces, Wired reported on Tuesday.
To be a giraffe among giraffes, or a pigeon among pigeons, is to live at all times in that scene from Being John Malkovich—a world in which everyone you know looks pretty much exactly like you. However wondrously varied the animal kingdom might be, on a species-level its residents tend to look more similar than not—at…
App developers can access more robust data about your face and the expressions you make with iPhone X, raising concerns from privacy advocates who worry that this sensitive facial data will end up in the hands of advertisers.
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