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By Andy Meek, BGR
Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney for
the ACLU, has been making the rounds telling media outlets that a newly
publicized patent from Amazon paints a picture of a dystopian,
“nightmarish” future. Strong words for a patent application that’s
starting to make headlines over fears that Amazon could use the Ring
doorbell camera company it acquired to build a robust tool for creepy
surveillance.
The patent application
envisions using a combination of doorbell cameras and facial
recognition technology to build a system that could be used to match
images of people who show up at your door to a “suspicious persons”
database. The system would even pull up information about that person if
it finds a match in the database. Homeowners would also be able to
upload photos of people they think are suspicious, which doesn’t sound
like it could be misused at all.
When the system gets a hit after searching the database, the details could quickly be sent to the police.
Already, the bare bones of such a system is already in place at Amazon’s Ring subsidiary. Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff told CNET that
users are already sharing information about crimes and criminals with
other Ring users. “We’re seeing it become a foundation,” he said.
They’re sharing that information within an app Ring launched in May
called Neighbors, which lets people view details about and comment on
crimes and related events in their area.
Naturally, privacy advocates are concerned. Snow told Fox News,
regarding the new patent, that “Amazon is dreaming of a dangerous
future, with its technology at the center of a massive decentralized
surveillance network, running real-time facial recognition on members of
the public using cameras installed in people’s doorbells.”
Worth
noting is that patent applications aren’t guarantees that a product or
technology will ever emerge in the future. Nevertheless, it’s also good
to point out that Amazon already landed in hot water earlier this year over its Rekognition facial recognition system that it’s sold and marketed to law enforcement agencies.
That
system was criticized, among other things, over being discriminatory
toward minorities, and it also made at least one high-profile gaffe. The
ACLU showed how it compared photos of congressmen to a database of
mugshots and wrongly identified more than two dozen lawmakers as
arrestees.
Amazon hasn’t commented over plans related to the
doorbell cameras and facial recognition. About the patent application,
though, Snow told The Washington Post that “This application gave me chills.”
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