Amazon is known for its online shopping. Among the hundreds of products you'll find is facial recognition software sold to law enforcement agencies.
Many people consider this to be a risk to privacy .
The authorities, of course, have a different opinion as the software frees their hands given that most of the time after a criminal act the police can take days to identify a suspect.
Washington is among the first to start using Amazon's facial recognition technology to speed up this process.
The tool can compare surveillance photos or other images from a crime scene to its database of 300,000 mugshots, providing results in seconds.
Civil liberties advocates and AI researchers are turning against Amazon providing such facial recognition software to police.
It is worth noting that no one has guaranteed the validity and reliability of this software, which instead of helping the police's work may ultimately make it more difficult.
In response to this challenge, representatives from the Authorities in Washington state that the technology is used responsibly and no one can ever be arrested based on facial recognition, it always ends up being a human-made decision.
