Days after IBM ceased sale of facial recognition services in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protest, Amazon informed that it was banning the use of its facial recognition software by police for a year to provide governments enough time to formulate policies to govern the use of such newer technologies. The move comes as pressure builds up on various tech companies offering facial technology solutions to check on the mass surveillance and racial profiling.
“We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge,” Amazon said in a statement. “We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.” Amazon noted that authorities will still be able to use the facial recognition technology to help rescue human trafficking victims and reunite missing children with their families.
Amazon's facial technology service, Rekognition, has been used by a number of law enforcement agencies, and even pitched to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the US, according to CNBC. However, the Amazon Web Services website has listed only Washington County Sheriff Office in Oregon as a Rekognition customer.
Rekognition can use machine learning to rapidly compare an image captured from a person's social media account or from an officer's smartphone to look for a match from a database of hundreds of thousands of mugshots.
However, Rekognition has been a controversial topic for the tech giant even before the latest spate of nationwide protests against police violence. Researchers have long criticised the technology for producing inaccurate results for people with darker skin. Studies have also shown that the technology can be biased against women and younger people. According to a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while lighter-skin men were often almost always positively identified, about 7 per cent of lighter-skin women were misidentified and up to 35 per cent of darker-skinned women were falsely identified.
American intelligence and military officials have long used facial recognition software in overseas anti-terrorist operations, but local and federal law enforcement agencies inside the US have increasingly turned to the software as a crime-fighting tool. According to NPR, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the US has used the technology to scan millions of driver's licenses for possible matches.
Amazon's moratorium on the facial recognition technology comes just two days after IBM CEO Aravind Krishna, in his letter to the members of the US Congress, emphasised that vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularly when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported.”
Civil rights activists welcomed Amazon's move, but pressed for a blanket ban on all facial recognition technologies. "Face recognition technology gives governments the unprecedented power to spy on us wherever we go. It fuels police abuse. This surveillance technology must be stopped," NPR quoted Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director with the ACLU of Northern California, as saying.
