Amazon has announced a new milestone regarding Rekognition, its in-house facial recognition system. The artificial intelligence-based tech is now able to pick up fear from people’s faces. Rekognition offers a diverse set of tools for face detection, analysis, and recognition in images and videos. It’s one of the services Amazon offers as part of its Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Amazon says it’s successfully improved detection accuracy for emotions such as happy, sad, angry, surprised, disgusted, calm, and confused. But it has one more emotion to add to the list: fear. It’s not immediately clear what the implications of such a development might have, but Amazon confirms that it has also Rekognition’s age range estimation accuracy, which means customers can get narrower age ranges “across most age groups. Unsurprisingly, the new development has drawn some fire from critics, especially considering that some of Amazon’s clients come from the law enforcement sector. Add to that the fact that facial recognition remains far from perfect and is known to misidentify women and people of color. In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, released a study showing that the technology misidentified 28 U.S. lawmakers.
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