Jul 26, 2018
Amazon tool flags Congress members as suspects
An Amazon facial recognition tool has wrongly identified 28 members of the US Congress as police suspects. Amazon took issue with the findings, saying the system needed to be set at 95% accuracy not the 80% used by ACLU. But the civil rights group said it highlighted the inadequacy of facial recognition technology. The tool - Rekognition - is touted by Amazon as being useful for a range of things, from detecting offensive content to identifying celebrities. The 80% accuracy range used by ACLU is the system's default setting but a spokeswoman for Amazon Web Services told Reuters that, for identifying individuals, it recommended setting a threshold of 95% or higher. According to ACLU, nearly 40% of the system's false matches were for black Congress members, even though they make up only 20% of the legislature.
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