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In a surprise blog post,
Amazon
said it will put the brakes on providing its facial recognition technology to police for one year.
The moratorium comes two days after IBM said
in a letter
it was leaving the facial recognition market altogether. Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chief executive, cited a “pursuit of justice and racial equity” in light of the recent protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month.
Amazon’s statement —
just 102 words in length
— did not say why it was putting the moratorium in place, but noted that Congress “appears ready” to work on stronger regulations governing the use of facial recognition — again without providing any details. It’s likely in response to the Justice in Policing Act
, a bill that would, if passed, restrict how police can use facial recognition technology.
“We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested,” said Amazon in the unbylined blog post.
But the statement did not say if the moratorium would apply to the federal government, the source of most of the criticism against Amazon’s facial recognition technology. Amazon also did not say in the statement what action it would take after the yearlong moratorium expires.
Amazon is
known to have pitched
its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to federal agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last year, Amazon’s cloud chief Andy Jassy said in an interview
the company would provide Rekognition to “any” government department.
Amazon spokesperson Kristin Brown declined to comment further or say if the moratorium applies to federal law enforcement.
There are
dozens of companies
providing facial recognition technology to police, but Amazon is by far the biggest. Amazon has come under the most scrutiny after its Rekognition face-scanning technology showed bias against people of color.
In 2018, the ACLU found that Rekognition falsely matched
28 members of Congress
as criminals in a mugshot database. Amazon criticized the results, claiming the ACLU had lowered the facial recognition system’s confidence threshold. But a year later, the ACLU of Massachusetts found that Rekognition had falsely matched
27 New England professional athletes against a mugshot database. Both tests disproportionately mismatched Black people, the ACLU found.
Investors brought a proposal to Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting almost exactly a year ago that would have forcibly banned Amazon from selling its facial recognition technology to the government or law enforcement. Amazon
defeated the vote
with a wide margin.
Amazon shareholders want the company to stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement