Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Privacy United States Hardware Technology

Orlando Police End Test of Amazon's Real-Time Facial 'Rekognition' System (npr.org) 94

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The city of Orlando, Fla., says it has ended a pilot program in which its police force used Amazon's real-time facial recognition -- a system called "Rekognition" that had triggered complaints from rights and privacy groups when its use was revealed earlier this year. Orlando's deal to open part of its camera systems to Amazon was reported by NPR's Martin Kaste in May, after the ACLU noticed that an Amazon Rekognition executive mentioned the city as a customer.

On Monday, the ACLU of Florida wrote a letter to Mayor Buddy Dyer and the Orlando City Council, demanding that the city "immediately" shut down "any face surveillance deployment or use by city agencies and departments." On the same day, Orlando city and police officials issued a joint statement saying that the test of how its officers might use the Rekognition technology ended last week. The city added, "Staff continues to discuss and evaluate whether to recommend continuation of the pilot at a further date," adding that "the contract with Amazon remains expired."
Orlando police say the test was limited to only a fraction of the city's cameras, and that the system was tested by tracking its own officers. The Rekognition deal with Orlando caused a stir after Ranju Das, the head of the Rekognition unit, said in early May: "City of Orlando is a launch partner of ours. It's a smart city; they have cameras all over the city. The authorized cameras are then streaming the data [...] we are a subscriber to the stream, we analyze the video in real time, search against the collection of faces that they have."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Orlando Police End Test of Amazon's Real-Time Facial 'Rekognition' System

Comments Filter:
  • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @10:40PM (#56851492) Journal
    Gone for a Domain Awareness System v2.0.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    Get that "track people within seconds" and years of quality.
  • So NOW who is going to catch the terrorists? Amazon is your friend, citizen.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why not tattoo a number on everyone's forehead and be done with it? Something like 666-something something something... Even people 2000 years ago saw this coming.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @11:06PM (#56851576)
    If you're worried about oppression the solution is to start taking power away from people. And that means money. A ruling class uses oppression to keep a disproportionate amount of wealth for themselves. They use poverty and economic stress to keep the working class at each other's throats. How else can 1% of the population claim 50-90% of the wealth and get away with it? Money is power. Real freedom comes when we've guaranteed everyone's access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation (the latter being needed to access the former). Until you do that you're one demagogue away from an angry mob, either joining it or being killed by it.
    • Rousseau was right.

    • guaranteed everyone's access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation

      Which can only be achieved through slavery. No free lunch is a law of the universe

      • by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        Which can only be achieved through the same taxes that pay for the services libertarians hypocritically enjoy

        FTFY

        No free lunch is a law of the universe

        A phrase commonly repeated by libertarians, who commonly ignore the fact that living in a first-world civilization isn't free.

    • How else can 1% of the population claim 50-90% of the wealth and get away with it?

      1) They deserve it, because they're better than you. I mean if they weren't better than you then they wouldn't be richer, would they?
      2) It's ${Deity}'s will.
      3) Any attempt to change that will inevitably turn the country into Venezuela with socialized medicine, death panels, and compulsory gay marriage. In a matter of hours.
      4) Various combinations of the above.

  • something like the gold standard
  • Wreck a Nation

  • "the system was tested by tracking its own officers"

    There's your mistake right there.
    The cops didn't like that the system saw that they spend half their day in the doughnut-shop. Small wonder.

  • The authorized cameras are then streaming the data [...] we are a subscriber to the stream, we analyze the video in real time, search against the collection of faces that they have

    So to do that, they had to capture ALL the faces in ALL the streams...which presumably are now sitting in the database

  • I wonder if it was as successful as this. [independent.co.uk]
  • What happens when criminals build their own facial recognition software to identify the police?

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

Working...