Amazon employees reportedly demanding Amazon stop selling facial recognition software to police

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Cliff
Owen/AP

• An anonymous Amazon employee wrote an op-ed for Medium
  demanding that Amazon stop selling its facial recognition
  software Rekognition to police forces.
• The employee said over 450 Amazon staffers wrote to
  Jeff Bezos asking for the same thing a few weeks ago, but have
  heard nothing back.
• The letter also demanded that Amazon kick software
  company Palantir off Amazon Web Services.

An anonymous Amazon employee has
written an op-ed for Medium demanding that Amazon cease
selling facial recognition software to police forces.

The employee, the authenticity of whom was verified by Medium’s
editorial staff, says that more than 450 Amazon workers wrote to
CEO Jeff Bezos a few weeks ago to demand the company stop selling
its facial recognition software Rekognition to police.

The letter also demanded that software company Palantir be kicked
off Amazon Web Services for its links to ICE’s deportation and
tracking program. Protesters at this year’s
Burning Man festival protested Palantir and Amazon for the
same reason.

In June
TechCrunch reported that Amazon staffers had sent a letter to
Bezos protesting Rekognition and Palantir, it’s unclear whether
it’s the same letter.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request
for comment.

The anonymous employee’s article specifically took aim at Bezos’s
continued support for Rekognition, saying, “we know Bezos is
aware of these concerns and the industry-wide conversation
happening right now. On stage, he acknowledged that big tech’s
products might be misused, even exploited, by autocrats. But
rather than meaningfully explain how Amazon will act to prevent
the bad uses of its own technology, Bezos suggested we wait for
society’s ‘immune response.'”

In
an interview with Medium columnist Trevor Timm, the employee
said there had been no official response to the letter. “So far
it’s been radio silence. There’s been no official response to the
letter and certainly no apparent change in how they market
Rekognition,” they said.

Rekognition has come under fire in the past for potentially
infringing on civil rights. The American Civil Liberties Union
even conducted an experiment which found that
Rekognition wrongly identified 28 out of 533 members of Congress
as people who had previously been arrested.

“Face surveillance also threatens to chill First
Amendment-protected activity like engaging in protest or
practicing religion, and it can be used to subject immigrants to
further abuse from the government,” the ACLU
wrote in a blog post at the time.

Amazon claimed that
the results of the ACLU’s experiment could have been improved
if it had configured its settings better.

The anonymous writer said that the Amazon employees who wrote the
letter to Bezos were following in the footsteps of similar
employee actions at
Google and Microsoft.

Finally, they said, “Amazon talks a lot about values of
leadership. If we want to lead, we need to make a choice between
people and profits. We can sell dangerous surveillance systems to
police or we can stand up for what’s right. We can’t do both.”