Amazon employees ask Jeff Bezos to cancel Recognition contract with law enforcement agencies.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
First, it was Google, then Microsoft, and now it is Amazon. Amazon employees are circulating an internal letter asking the CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling the company's face recognition software--Recognition-- to the law enforcement agencies and to boot data-mining firm Palantir from its cloud services.
The internal letter, obtained by Gizmodo, comes in response the US President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance policy along the Mexican border and it calls for the company bosses to stop selling Recognition to law enforcement agencies, stop providing infrastructure to Palantir or any other partner besides implementing strong transparency measures in the company.
"In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.'s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and DHS," Amazon employees wrote in the latter adding, "As ethically concerned Amazonians, we demand a choice in what we build and a say in how it is used."
However, this is not the first such call asking Bezos to quit providing the company's face recognition technology to the US government. Earlier this week, a group of Amazon shareholders asked Bezos to stop selling and marketing Recognition technology to governments. The letter that was signed by 19 shareholders raised concerns about the company's facial recognition technology could be used to violate civil and human rights.
"We are concerned the technology would be used to unfairly and disproportionately target and surveil people of colour, immigrants, and civil society organisations," the letter obtained by The Independent stated adding that the "surveillance technologies would harden the circle of repression".
The letter by the Amazon shareholders came in response to a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with more than 150,000 signatures requesting the company to stop providing Recognition to the governmental agencies.
This article is from https://www.indiatoday.in
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