Orlando City Council has called off any further trials of Amazon's real-time facial recognition technology, called Rekognition, soon after the second phase of the pilot program ended last Thursday.

"At this time, the city was not able to dedicate the resources to the pilot to enable us to make any noticeable progress toward completing the needed configuration and testing," read a memo from Orlando's Chief Administrative Office to Orlando's City Council.

The memo also said that the city has "no immediate plans regarding future pilots to explore this type of facial recognition technology".

According to Orlando Weekly, the two-phase pilot program with the City Council started in December 2017. The first phase of the program lasted for six months to June 2018, before the second phase was started in October 2018. 

The trial saw the technology tap into four cameras at the police department's headquarters, three in downtown, and one outside a community recreation center.

However since starting the trial, the news report said the technology had been caught up with technical lags, bandwidth issues, and uncertainty over whether the face-scanning technology -- that was designed to automatically identify and track suspects in real-time -- actually worked.

Read More...

Related Articles:

Amazon wants you to be part of its dish network. Yes, it's a play on words (and not a good one!). This network springs from Amazon's Ring doorbell -- the doorbell with a camera inside and a cozy relationship with law enforcement! What are your neighbors and strangers up to? Give the dirt to law enforcement and trust their better judgment!

In a previously undocumented use of facial recognition software, police in Washington state are using Amazon’s ‘Rekognition’ to track down criminals with as little as an artist’s sketch. 

The Washington County Sheriff's Office became the first law enforcement agency in the country known to use Amazon's artificial-intelligence tool Rekognition, transforming this thicket of forests and suburbs into a public testing ground for a new wave of experimental police surveillance techniques.

Stories of resistance against biometric schemes are seldom seen in established media because Big Tech lawyers head off such stories by bullying outlets with legal threats. Monsanto and Big Pharma turned this into an art form.

For those of you that still hold onto to the idea that America will never follow in China's, Big Brother footsteps, I give you this disturbing story. A recent CNet article revealed how the Washington County Sheriff's Office (WCSO) in Oregon uses Amazon's Rekognition software to identify shoplifters.