A coalition of 85 rights organisations has asked US tech giants including Amazon, Google and others to not sell face recognition systems to the US government.A coalition of 85 different organizations including human rights groups, civil liberty organizations, and justice system reform advocates also sent the Amazon CEO an open letter demanding that his company stop selling facial-recognition technology to the government. In the open letter, the coalition recognizes Google's present stance on facial recognition, referencing, among other things, a Google blog post showing the company's desire to not sell facial recognition tech to any government until appropriate concerns have been resolved.The ACLU-led coalition seeks for Google to take a firmer stance against ever selling facial recognition tech to any government, saying it could easily lead to the singling out of minorities of all varieties.The group claims that facial recognition technology gives the government new power to target and single out immigrants, religious minorities, and people of color in our communities. “Systems built on face surveillance will amplify and exacerbate historical and existing bias that harms these and other over-policed and over-surveilled communities”.Similar letters were also sent to Amazon and Microsoft, by the ACLU, urging each company to commit to not sell their facial recognition technology to the government.However, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) spokesperson has responded to Planet Biometrics pointing to the many positive and important uses of facial recognition technology that are being implemented today, including ending child sexual abuse, finding missing children, fighting against human trafficking, identifying and investigating mass shooting suspects, preventing imposters from using false identifications at airports, and improving content moderation. “This technology is being implemented in ways that materially benefit society, and we have received no indications of misuse”.She also pointed to an AWS post by Dr. Matt Wood that debunks ACLU facial recognition trials that purportedly showed failures in recognising Congress representatives.”The 80% confidence threshold used by the ACLU is far too low to ensure the accurate identification of individuals; we would expect to see false positives at this level of confidence. We recommend 99% for use cases where highly accurate face similarity matches are important,” he writes.Additionally, only one in four Americans (26 percent) think government should strictly limit the use of facial recognition technology, according to a new survey from the Center for Data Innovation.

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