Amazon is giving police departments a new tool in their crime-fighting arsenal — a move that has some civil rights groups up in arms.
The Amazon Rekognition platform is an image and video analysis system that is able to identify objects, people, text, scenes and activities occurring in a piece of media. According to Amazon, the technology offers facial analysis and recognition capabilities that can detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, cataloging, people counting and public safety use cases.
According to articles in and , Rekognition technology is already in place and in the field at some law enforcement organizations.