Violent Crime Is Up. Expanding the Surveillance State Is Not the Solution
Big Tech’s broad surveillance push violates privacy at best, and perpetuates racist over-policing at worst. It’s exactly the wrong choice for tenuous, tumultuous times.
By Joe Berkowitz
About a year before Jeff Bezos flew to space, he got called on the carpet. Amazon had just responded to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police with a $10 million donation, when observers began pointing out Amazon’s flagrant hypocrisy. After all, the company had spent years selling its inherently biased facial recognition software directly to police, who could be using that software to track activists in a burgeoning protest movement Amazon ostensibly supported. Pretty soon, the company issued a stunning secondary announcement: that Amazon had put a one-year pause on its facial recognition tech, in hopes that Congress would by then have created legislation to properly regulate it.
Amazon’s cover-your-ass gesture, while certainly laudable, has had very little impact thus far on the bigger picture. Aside from the many smaller companies like Rank One, Cognitec, and NEC, which continue to sell facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, many other strains of…
