Amazon pauses police use of its facial recognition software
Amazon said Wednesday it was putting a one-year pause on letting police use its facial recognition tool, in a major sign of the growing concerns that the technology may lead to unfair treatment of African Americans.
The technology giant did not explain its reasoning in its brief blog post about the change, but the move came amid the nationwide protests over racism and biased policing. Amazon’s technology had been criticized in the past for misidentifying people of color.
In its blog post, the company said it hoped the moratorium on its service, Rekognition, “might give Congress enough time to put in place appropriate rules” for the ethical use of facial recognition.
The announcement was a striking change for Amazon, a prominent supplier of facial recognition software to law enforcement. More than other big technology companies, Amazon has resisted calls to slow its deployment.
On Monday, IBM said it would stop selling facial recognition products, and last year, the leading maker of police body cameras banned the use of facial recognition on its products at the recommendation of its independent ethics board.
Law enforcement agencies and some companies use facial recognition technology to identify suspects and victims. The systems work by trying to match facial pattern data extracted from photos or video with those in databases like driver’s license records. Authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at an Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper last year.
But civil liberties groups have warned that the technology can be used at a distance to secretly identify individuals — such as protesters attending demonstrations — without their knowledge and consent.
For the past two years, the American Civil Liberties Union has led a campaign to push Amazon to stop selling the technology to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
The group obtained documents, using open information laws, from police departments that showed how Amazon was aggressively marketing its technology to law enforcement.