Popular Facial ID System Fingers 28 Congressmen as Wanted Suspects

We don't always agree with the ACLU, but in this case, they appear to have legitimate issues with a popular type of facial recognition software.

Rekognition is a program sold from Amazon, and has been used since 2016 by web developers. The powerful system has been offered access to governments, including police forces. It'd a product of Amazon's cloud division.

According to trust.org, the ACLU and other critics are demanding the company stop offering this system, claiming it could be misused against not only 'people of color' but the general public.

They want the government to issue a moratorium preventing it from being used by law enforcement. This sounds like something right out of the Minority Report or Total Recall movies, but facial recognition is nothing new and it's being used more than you think.

It's being used in some airports and other high security checkpoint areas. But not widespread use by day to day law enforcement...yet.

The latest Droid and i-Phones have either facial recognition or fingerprint ID that can be used to lock the phone and unlock instead of a password. But the ramifications of police use are a whole other issue.  Critics say the technology could be used to scan crowds of people or in places where a suspected wanted criminal is thought to be. But what if it mis-identifies someone?

The current hubub is over a test run by the ACLU, in which Rekognition reportedly matched the faces of 28 U.S. Congressional members with mugshots of 28 wanted criminals.  Aside from this serious privacy issue, that's actually kind of funny!