Amazon’s public policy team is drafting legislation that would regulate the use of facial recognition technologies, but some privacy advocates think that’s a bad idea.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced the legislation-writing effort during an Alexa event in Seattle in late September. Bezos didn’t offer details, but he told the audience that “it makes a lot of sense” to regulate facial recognition tools.
Bezos’ announcement comes after the company released a set of guidelines for facial recognition legislation back in February. The company called for a human review of the results when the technology is used by law enforcement, among other things.
Facial recognition technologies have raised privacy fears in recent years, with hundreds of Amazon employees signing a letter in 2018 protesting the company’s sale of its technology to law enforcement. Some privacy advocates say the use of facial recognition technologies by law enforcement agencies, combined with the growing number of deployed security cameras, could create a massive surveillance state.
Some advocates suggested Amazon shouldn’t be writing the rules for the use of the technology. Amazon creating legislation may be the “worst idea ever,” said Andrew Selepak, media professor and director of the graduate program in social media at the University of Florida.
“Allowing Jeff Bezos and Amazon [to] write the laws or regulations that cover any technology involving consumer privacy, especially ones involving biometric data, is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” he said. “Big tech wants to collect as much data about us as possible to use that information to market products to us and to sell our information to other advertisers. Biometric data from facial or fingerprint recognition systems is the next step in data collection.”
Industry-approved facial recognition rules will turn large tech vendors into Big Brother instead of the government, he added. Tech vendors will be able to track customers, and “they will be laughing all the way to the bank, right past Capitol Hill.”
Amazon should receive praise for being transparent about its facial recognition efforts and its attempts to be accountable, added Damien Mason, a digital privacy advocate at ProPrivacy, a privacy-focused tech review site.
It’s difficult for lawmakers to “regulate and legislate things they don’t understand within a reasonable time frame,” he added. “Governments worldwide are often archaic in their approach to tech, taking years to adopt policies that often end up insufficient to deal with exploits and abuse, of which there are many when it comes to facial recognition.”
Mason urged caution to companies embracing facial recognition. “Without knowing what is in the proposed legislation, it’s difficult to support such an Orwellian approach that encroaches on the public’s right to privacy by enabling mass surveillance,” he said. Amazon’s employees have already questioned the company’s Rekognition product, “and steering through those landmines ultimately seems impossible.”
Many privacy advocates have called for facial recognition regulations, and Mike Deittrick, senior vice president of digital strategy and chief digital officer at mobile strategy vendor DMI, agreed. “But guidelines should be created by an independent board of experts in academia, law, and practical ethics, as opposed to commercial entities who stand to gain financially from newly formed policies,” he said.
A handful of bills regulating the technology have been introduced in the current session of Congress. Among them: The Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act in the Senate would require end-users to give consent to the use of facial recognition in many cases, and H.R. 3875 would prohibit the use of federal funding for purchasing facial recognition technologies.
Other experts welcomed Amazon’s contributions, even if they are only a piece of the regulatory puzzle.
“We don’t know what Amazon’s lobbying efforts will include yet, but it could be a good starting point,” said Paul Bischoff, a consumer privacy expert at Comparitech.com, a security-focused tech research and review site. “However, we need to include a diverse range of parties that include consumer advocates, private companies, law enforcement, digital rights activists, and elected officials. Any regulation that comes from a single company’s point of view would almost certainly be biased in that company’s favor.”
Amazon’s suggestions may be a good first draft of regulations, given a lack of expertise in Congress, added Jason David, CEO of Software Portal, a software review site.
Amazon’s suggestions could “then be amended and changed as Congress sees fit,” he said. “We absolutely should not just rubber-stamp whatever Amazon delivers, but it can certainly be treated as a starting point.”
