It shouldn't take an intern too long to collect a representative set of Congress people and other high officials for training. Maintaining it would not be an undue burden. That would eliminate the false positive matches for all the unwanted celebs. Clearly Amazon's models aren't that great to begin with so there's little reason to stick with them.
Wrap it up into a simple native app and you can bypass the MMS BS. Even better, a sufficiently capable dev could integrate an opensource recognition library [1] to have it entirely implemented on the device.
We'll probably work on something like this for the next version. One reason it's harder than you think: We would have to buy / own rights to the photographs before we could use them to train -- most of those photos are owned by Getty or the AP. And our own photographs are perfectly lit and square, which made them awful for training face recognition.
The other hangup (which I didn't get to in the article) is having to add / remove people. New members are constantly being added and that's a maintenance burden for us. Amazon usually has the new member within a day or two. (Our team is very small and we have a lot of other responsibilities!)
In USA I don't think it is because the end use is transformative [1].
In UK it would be tortuous because it relies on Fair Use to temporarily store the images in order to extract the facial structure data. Fair Dealing is really draconian in comparison.
And it's our job, as someone who knows what a computer is, to move forward with common sense if they're overreaching which, is their job.
They have every incentive to be as conservative in their advice as possible, and no incentives to "allow" risks. Doesn't increase their compensation any.
But...doesn't congress maintain some sort of api for available bio data - possibly including photos - to avoid the maintenance issue brought up in the piece? A quick google search shows propublica has sych an api, and it seems to have originally been developed by NYT... https://projects.propublica.org/api-docs/congress-api/
Wrap it up into a simple native app and you can bypass the MMS BS. Even better, a sufficiently capable dev could integrate an opensource recognition library [1] to have it entirely implemented on the device.
[1] https://github.com/rudybrian/tuFace