Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America's police

Sharon Bradford Franklin is quoted in NBC News raising privacy concerns with the increasingly prevalent police use of comprehensive surveillance technologies.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates have warned that the Ring partnerships are creating a new layer of government surveillance. Amazon employees, artificial intelligence researchers and activist investors have asked the company to stop selling its facial recognition service to law enforcement, to stop providing web-hosting services that help federal immigration authorities, and to create a committee that would review the potential societal consequences of its products.

“While providing secure cloud storage does not appear to pose privacy threats, providing a package of technologies that includes powerful surveillance tools like facial recognition and doorbell cameras, plus the capability to pool data into a massive database and run data analytics, does create very real privacy threats,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, policy director of New America's Open Technology Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights.

For example, Franklin said, a homeowner might voluntarily share the footage from their doorbell camera with police seeking clues to a crime that occurred nearby. The police might then run the video through facial recognition software, which is imperfect and might incorrectly identify innocent people as potential suspects. Those wrong matches could then be shared with other agencies, such as immigration enforcement, with far-reaching consequences.