Amazon’s Rekognition messes up, matches 28 lawmakers to mugshots

Enlarge (credit: American Civil Liberties Union)

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said Thursday that in its new test of Amazon's facial recognition system known as Rekognition, the software erroneously identified 28 members of Congress as people who have been arrested for a crime.

According to Jake Snow, an ACLU attorney, the organization downloaded 25,000 mugshots from what he described as a "public source."

The ACLU then ran the official photos of all 535 members of Congress through Rekognition, asking it to match them up with any of the mugshots-and it ended up matching 28.

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