Orlando PD tries out Amazon's new facial recognition technology

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Tech companies are trying to sell police real-time facial recognition systems, which can track and identify people as they walk down the street. As NPR reported two weeks ago, American police have generally held off, but there's new evidence that one police department — Orlando, Fla. — has decided to try it out.

What's more, Orlando ordered its facial recognition system from Amazon.

This information was uncovered by the ACLU, which noticed that law enforcement customers were mentioned in the marketing of Amazon's "Rekognition" service. Until now, American police have used facial recognition primarily to compare still photos from crime scenes with mug shots. But now Amazon and Orlando are taking it further, by using facial recognition to spot people in real time.

"City of Orlando is a launch partner of ours," Amazon's Ranju Das recently told a developer conference in Seoul, South Korea. "They have cameras all over the city. The authorized cameras are then streaming the data ... we are a subscriber to the stream, we analyze the video in real time, search against the collection of faces they have.

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