Wow this article is so biased, it’s honestly incredible. They make Rekognition sound like some shady service that is only being used by the US government for surveillance. Anyone can use it for any purpose. Just because the US government is using it for a malicious purpose, doesn’t mean that the service is. Your problem should be with the government, not Amazon.
Details of the deal with Orlando Police Department indicated Amazon was following it’s normal business model: start cheap and wait for the customers to come. For 30,989 images processed, the department only had to pay $30.99, according to a document obtained by the ACLU.
This is probably one of the worst parts of the article, doesn’t bother mentioning that this is the standard price for everyone. Doesn’t bother mentioning what AWS is and how it makes up sales in scale. Doesn’t bother mentioning that all 100+ AWS services use micropayments (or that Azure and Google Cloud and IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud also do this).
You can look for yourself right on the AWS website how much you will pay for image processing, you didn’t need some “special document”. Says right there:
“Price per 1,000 Images Processed”: $1.00
30,989 / $1.00 = $30.99
Who would have thought basic math was hard.
