"Amazon heads off facial recognition rebellion" 22 May 2019

Shareholders seeking to halt Amazon's sale of its facial recognition technology to US police forces have been defeated in two votes that sought to pressure the company into a rethink. Civil rights campaigners had said it was "perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed". But investors rejected the proposals at the company's annual general meeting...The first vote had proposed that the company should stop offering its Rekognition system to government agencies. The second had called on it to commission an independent study into whether the tech threatened people's civil rights...Amazon has yet to comment...It said that Rekognition had a 0% error rate at classifying lighter-skinned males as such within a test, but a 31.4% error rate at categorising darker-skinned females. Amazon has disputed the findings saying that the researchers had used "an outdated version" of its tool and that its own checks had found "no difference" in gender-classification across ethnicities... opposition to Rekognition has also been voiced by civil liberties groups and hundreds of Amazon's own workers...But one of the directors from Amazon Web Services - the division responsible - had told the BBC that it should be up to politicians to decide if restrictions should be put in place.