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Amazon Staff Demand Jeff Bezos Stop Selling Face-Scanning Tech to Police | Newsweek

Amazon workers called on the firm’s CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling powerful face recognition tech to U.S. law enforcement and cease providing infrastructure to government-linked software giant Palantir, and said they “refuse to contribute to tools that violate human rights.”

The letter circulated inside Amazon after it emerged that several tech companies had sold software tools to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency at the center of a controversial family separation practice this week. It followed a May ACLU report exposing how Amazon face-scanning tech called “AWS Rekognition” had been sold to police and government agencies.

The staffers noted Palantir, the big data analytics company founded by Trump-supporting Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, takes full advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud technology to help “power its detention and deportation programs.” In 2014, Palantir was awarded an ICE contact worth $41 million to build an intelligence program that could allegedly aid deportations.

Source: Amazon Staff Demand Jeff Bezos Stop Selling Face-Scanning Tech to Police