Orlando Police Confirm Installation of Amazon Facial Recognition Cameras Downtown
The Orlando Police Department has admitted to secretly installing Amazon’s facial recognition system on three surveillance cameras in the city’s downtown area. So far, the technology has only been used to identify volunteer police officers, according to a report by the Orlando Sentinel.
Last week, activists from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) discovered that Amazon has been providing its facial recognition software, called Rekognition, to U.S. law enforcement agencies. This program can identify up to 100 people in a single image and compare them to tens of millions of photos stored in databases. The activists found that Rekognition is being used by police in Washington County, Oregon, as well as in Orlando, Florida.
At a conference in Seoul, Rekognition project director Ranju Das revealed that facial recognition cameras are installed throughout Orlando, and Amazon’s servers analyze the data from these cameras in real time. He also demonstrated footage recorded on Orlando’s streets in November 2017.
In response to these revelations, Orlando Police Chief John Mina stated that the footage shown was not actually from Orlando and that Amazon has “very limited” access to the camera recordings. He explained that the facial recognition system is currently in a test phase, with only seven volunteer police officers in its database. According to Mina, the department is simply evaluating the effectiveness of facial recognition technology in general and does not plan to permanently implement Amazon’s program at this time.
The police chief initially promised to disclose the locations of the facial recognition cameras but later changed his mind, citing public safety concerns. Just a few days earlier, he had denied that the police were using facial recognition cameras in public spaces, claiming that Rekognition was only installed on cameras near the police department.
Matt Cagle, an attorney with the ACLU, believes that the future of this issue will depend on Amazon’s response. Civil rights advocates have already sent an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, urging the company to stop selling potentially dangerous technologies to U.S. law enforcement, warning that such tools could be used not only to track criminals but also political activists and immigrants.