Amazon has extended its ban on providing facial-recognition technology to law enforcement indefinitely.
The company declined to elaborate on the decision, but it comes about a week after civil liberties groups called on Amazon to “permanently ban law enforcement from using Amazon’s facial recognition software, Rekognition.” As Forbes reports, it’s also a week before a May 26 shareholder meeting, where a “shareholder proposal is calling for an independent third-party audit on the risks linked with government use of Rekognition.”
In June 2020, as the country was up in arms over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on offering Rekognition for “police use.” At the time, it said it hoped the pause would “give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules.” Microsoft made a similar pledge at the time.
While some US cities, from Portland, Maine, to San Francisco, have banned the use of facial-recognition tech by law enforcement, legislation has not yet passed at the federal level.
More than three dozen civil liberties groups argued in a May 10 letter that a year after Floyd’s death, “the problem of police violence against the Black community persists. Nearly 200 Black people have been killed by police since the murder of George Floyd. Allowing police to use Rekognition, a dangerous surveillance tool, poses a threat to the safety of Black communities and others who are already being unfairly targeted and surveilled by law enforcement.”
The groups pointed to outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos’ June 2020 statement that he was “happy to lose” racist customers over his support of Black Lives Matter. “It is impossible to sell surveillance tech to law enforcement, and also stand in solidarity with Black lives,” they wrote. “We urge you to do the right thing: make the ban on police use of Rekognition permanent and abolish surveillance technology.”
In a Tuesday statement, the ACLU praised the extended Rekognition moratorium. “Now, the Biden administration and legislatures across the country must further protect communities from the dangers of this technology by ending its use by law enforcement entirely, regardless which company is selling it,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
It’s not hard to find stories about facial recognition gone awry in police work. Last year, Detroit police arrested the wrong man based on facial-recognition results, while Amazon’s own system has been shown to have a racial-bias problem.
