In the very near future, prospective Amazon Marketplace sellers will be required to submit to the Orwellian demands of Jeff Bezos, who reportedly wants to record every seller's face using his "Rekognition" facial recognition technology in order to "verify" them.
Getting approval to sell things on Amazon, in other words, will soon be contingent upon allowing Beelzebezos to capture five-second recordings of your face, which will then be processed through Amazon's artificial intelligence (AI) apparatus for approval.
Amazon claims that the move is part of a larger-scale effort to crack down on fake sellers, many of whom sell counterfeit goods via the Marketplace. By using facial recognition to verify sellers' identities, Amazon can, in essence, create a safer and more honest Marketplace experience, the company claims.
"We always experiment with new ways to verify the information sellers provide us in order to protect our store from bad actors," an Amazon spokesperson told the DailyMail Online (U.K.). "Seller identification information is securely stored and used only for identify verification."
But privacy and surveillance experts warn that the creepy technology is just the latest phase of a calculated, technocracy-led affront to individual liberty – like something out of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.
"Imagine a technology that is potently, uniquely dangerous? – ?something so inherently toxic that it deserves to be completely rejected, banned, and stigmatized. Something so pernicious that regulation cannot adequately protect citizens from its effects," writes Evan Selinger for Medium.com.
"That technology is already here. It is facial recognition technology, and its dangers are so great that it must be rejected entirely."
What makes Amazon's Rekognition technology so nefarious, as we earlier reported, is that it can easily be expanded to keep 24/7 tabs on sovereign individuals, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
"People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government," warned the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), responding to the use of Amazon's Rekognition technology by law enforcement in Oregon.
Even if Amazon really was acting completely above-board with its Rekognition technology, planning only to use it for improving the Marketplace experience for both buyers and sellers – which we know isn't the case, seeing as how Beelzebezos has already been caught sharing Rekognition with government agencies – the technology would still eventually end up in the wrong hands.
As Selinger warns, there's simply no way to introduce full-scale facial recognition technology into society, no matter its stated purpose, without also opening up a Pandora's Box of "oppressive, ubiquitous surveillance systems and the kind of loose and dangerous data practices that civil rights and privacy rules aim to prevent."
"Consent rules, procedural requirements, and boilerplate contracts are no match for that kind of formidable infrastructure and irresistible incentives for exploitation," he contends.
The ACLU has actually publicly demanded that Amazon stop engaging in this fascist partnership with government agencies, warning that this public-private "surveillance infrastructure" poses "a grave threat to customers and communities across the country."
"Amazon should not be in the business of providing surveillance systems like Rekognition to the government," the ACLU maintains.
For related news about the AI invasion and how technocrats are using it to implement 1984 on a massive scale, be sure to check out AISystems.news.
Sources for this article include: