An Amazon staffer says over 450 employees wrote to Jeff Bezos demanding Amazon stop selling facial recognition software to police

Cliff Owen/AP

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

• An anonymous Amazon employee wrote an op-ed for Medium demanding that Amazon stop selling its facial recognition software Rekognition to police forces.
• The employee said over 450 Amazon staffers wrote to Jeff Bezos asking for the same thing a few weeks ago, but have heard nothing back.
• The letter also demanded that Amazon kick software company Palantir off Amazon Web Services.

An anonymous Amazon employee has written an op-ed for Medium demanding that Amazon cease selling facial recognition software to police forces.

The employee, the authenticity of whom was verified by Medium's editorial staff, says that more than 450 Amazon workers wrote to CEO Jeff Bezos a few weeks ago to demand the company stop selling its facial recognition software Rekognition to police.

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The letter also demanded that software company Palantir be kicked off Amazon Web Services for its links to ICE's deportation and tracking program. Protesters at this year's Burning Man festival protested Palantir and Amazon for the same reason.

In June TechCrunch reported that Amazon staffers had sent a letter to Bezos protesting Rekognition and Palantir, it's unclear whether it's the same letter.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The anonymous employee's article specifically took aim at Bezos's continued support for Rekognition, saying, "we know Bezos is aware of these concerns and the industry-wide conversation happening right now. On stage, he acknowledged that big tech's products might be misused, even exploited, by autocrats. But rather than meaningfully explain how Amazon will act to prevent the bad uses of its own technology, Bezos suggested we wait for society's 'immune response.'"

In an interview with Medium columnist Trevor Timm, the employee said there had been no official response to the letter. "So far it's been radio silence. There's been no official response to the letter and certainly no apparent change in how they market Rekognition," they said.

Rekognition has come under fire in the past for potentially infringing on civil rights. The American Civil Liberties Union even conducted an experiment which found that Rekognition wrongly identified 28 out of 533 members of Congress as people who had previously been arrested.

"Face surveillance also threatens to chill First Amendment-protected activity like engaging in protest or practicing religion, and it can be used to subject immigrants to further abuse from the government," the ACLU wrote in a blog post at the time.

Amazon claimed that the results of the ACLU's experiment could have been improved if it had configured its settings better.

The anonymous writer said that the Amazon employees who wrote the letter to Bezos were following in the footsteps of similar employee actions at Google and Microsoft.

Finally, they said, "Amazon talks a lot about values of leadership. If we want to lead, we need to make a choice between people and profits. We can sell dangerous surveillance systems to police or we can stand up for what's right. We can't do both."