We hope you had a good Prime Day because it’s getting pretty tough to be jazzed about a fake holiday created solely to benefit a company as increasingly dystopian as Amazon. From employee exploitation to brutal crackdowns of unions that fight back, maybe it’s not so great that famous divorced dad Jeff Bezos has more money than god, a stranglehold on modern retail, and a major newspaper to boot.
There are plenty of ways for Amazon to soften its image, even without really changing its behavior. But a great way to creep everyone out even more is proudly talk about your new fear detection tech.
Amazon Rekognition is the company’s controversial face detection and analysis technology. The name alone sounds like it comes from a Paul Verhoeven movie. Since its launch in 2016, critics have decried the potential racial biases of the “objective” invasive software, which is especially dangerous if its profiling functionality is being used by the police, a group known for sensitivity towards marginalized groups.
But despite this, Amazon Rekognition is still a thing. And Amazon just announced the ways in which it is now even more accurate. The big new feature is detecting certain facial emotions in videos. Amazon can now determine if you are happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm, and confused. If I know Amazon is profiling my face, I’m already pretty sure which of these emotions I’ll be feeling. Rekognition also now does a better job at estimating gender and age range.
If you’re still skeptical about the rise of facial recognition software you aren’t alone. London police’s facial recognition system has an 81 percent error rate and the recent Facial Recognition Privacy Act aims to protect your ID. But as this tech spread, even coming into our schools, we have to make sure responsible groups are in charge. Amazon isn’t one of those groups. If you could see my face now, you’d see it’s sad.
