Amazon has decided to suspend police access to its facial recognition technology for a year while it awaits federal regulation on tools , according to recent statements from the company.
The announcement follows years of pressure from police reform advocates and privacy activists, including theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, to halt the use of facial recognition by police, citing concerns about racial bias and the potential creation of an oppressive automated system that would make it too easy to identify and track any citizen.
“Facial recognition technology gives governments unprecedented power to spy on us wherever we go. It fuels police abuse of power. Unchecked surveillance must stop,” said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director for theACLUof Northern California.
Additionally, Amazon said it has urged governments to enact “stronger regulations governing the ethical use of facial recognition technology”and stressed that Congress “appears ready to rise to this challenge.”
“We need to make sure this suspension of operations leads to a permanent ban,” said Liz O’Sullivan, a privacy activist and founder of Artur AI. O’Sullivan called Amazon’s announcement “a victory for activists and academics” who have been pushing for years for stricter reforms to the use of facial recognition technology. But she noted that it is “system surveillance is flawed, biased and has racial implications,” calling on activists and other citizens to lobby local lawmakers to ensure any regulation “supports people against corporate interests.”
The one-year suspension of Amazon's Rekognition service by police does not include organizations that work closely with police to identify victims of child sexual abuse and trafficking, such as the NGOThorn, theNational Center for Missing and Exploited Children, andMarinus Analytics.
In July 2018, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) conducted an audit of Rekognition and discovered that it had misidentified 28 members of Congress, identifying them as people who had been arrested for crimes.
Amazon then said that the ACLU had set the system 's " confidence rate " to a lower level than recommended, resulting in a higher number of false positives.
"Machine learning is a valuable tool that helps law enforcement agencies. Despite the concerns of many about whether it is being implemented properly, it does not mean that we should leave such an important technological breakthrough unexploited," the company said in a July 2018 statement.
Similar commitments from IBM followed Amazon's announcement, when CEO Arvind Krishnawrote a letter to Congress stating that it would stop researching and developing facial recognition and tracking technology.
«We believe that now is the time to begin the national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be developed by domestic law.»
Krishna also said the company "strongly disagrees" with the use of facial recognition for "mass surveillance, racial profiling, and infringement of basic human rights and freedoms."
