Face Recognition at Your Doorbell – Not Only Privacy Infringement

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It appears that Amazon’s facial recognition software wouldn’t just be licensed to law enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify potential criminals, but used to scan the eyeballs of anyone who walks by your front door.

Ring, a smart camera doorbell company was purchased by Amazon this year. A new patent application by Amazon outlines a product capable of identifying passersby and sending an image of their likeness to law enforcement.

Basically, Ring would be equipped with facial scanning software — similar to Amazon’s proprietary Rekognition program — which matches “suspicious” people with mugshots in police databases.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has publicly criticized the application. In a detailed blogspot, the organization described how the product works and why you should be alarmed. It joins a growing outcry against the company’s technology that includes its own employees and shareholders and the entire Black Congressional Congress.

As ACLU’s Jacob Snow writes, the application describes a system that the police can use to match the faces of people walking by a doorbell camera with a photo database of persons they deem “suspicious.” Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. In either case, if a match occurs, the person’s face can be automatically sent to law enforcement, and the police could arrive in minutes.