Amazon says cops can't use its facial-recognition tech for a year, but not much else

When it comes to publicly pushing back against an ever-encroaching police state, the devil is in the details — or, in Amazon's case, the lack of them. 

Amazon announced Wednesday — in the most passive voice possible — that, for a year, police will no longer have access to its controversial facial-recognition tool dubbed Rekognition. Without mentioning the Black Lives Matter movement or the police abuses that followed the killing of George Floyd, the company blandly advocated for generic "regulations" to govern the biased technology. 

What Amazon did not say, however, is perhaps more important than what it did. Nowhere in the short statement did Amazon specify when the moratorium would start. Is it effective immediately, or at some future date? Nowhere did the company provide clarity as to which police departments this moratorium would affect. Is it limited to police forces in the US, or does it affect the entire world?  Read more...