What Next - Smile! You're on Amazon's Camera
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sheriff’s offices across the country are signing up to beta-test a facial recognition tool made by Amazon. Law enforcement proponents say the technology helps find perpetrators who otherwise may go free. But civil liberties advocates have questions about the accuracy —and the constitutionality—of these tools.
Guest: Reporter Drew Harwell. Read his latest in the Washington Post.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The first law enforcement agency in the country to use Amazon's facial recognition technology |
| 0:09.9 | was the sheriff's office in Hillsborough, Oregon. It happened almost by accident. |
| 0:16.2 | All it took was one guy who works in a little cubicle at their headquarters. |
| 0:22.0 | Drew Harwell writes for The Washington Post. |
| 0:24.6 | He met up with a developer who built all this software. |
| 0:27.8 | I mean, it was effectively just him building this giant surveillance machine |
| 0:32.4 | with very few kind of best practices to guide him. |
| 0:37.9 | This guy, his name's Chris Adzma. |
| 0:40.5 | He was a techie, started in the sheriff's office to design an iPhone app to track inmate |
| 0:45.2 | behavior. |
| 0:46.6 | And a few months back, he caught this annual conference Amazon was holding for web developers. |
| 0:51.6 | Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy. |
| 1:00.0 | If you watch this meetup, it has the feel of a corporate pep rally crossed with a TED Talk. |
| 1:06.0 | You're here with 43,000 of your peers. |
| 1:09.0 | There's another 60,000 plus in the live stream. |
| 1:12.3 | And the big unveiling that year was recognition. |
| 1:17.4 | It's Amazon's facial recognition feature. |
| 1:20.7 | And Amazon sort of was advertising this to developers as, hey, here's something new you can try. |
| 1:28.3 | You could imagine programming the camera with computer vision models where if you recognize |
| 1:34.3 | a license plate coming into your driveway, it'll open the garage door. |
| 1:39.3 | Or you could program it to send you an alert when your dog gets on the couch. |
| 1:43.3 | They had all these kind of |
... |
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