Amazon said on Wednesday that police won’t be able to use its facial recognition software for a year. This comes as pressure on tech companies grows after a police officer in Minneapolis killed George Floyd.
Amazon said in a statement, “We’ve been pushing for governments to make stronger rules about how to use facial recognition technology in a moral way. In recent days, Congress seems ready to take on this challenge.” “We hope that this one-year delay will give Congress enough time to make the right rules, and we’re ready to help if they need it.”
Even though the House Committee on Oversight and Reform has talked about the use of facial recognition technology at a number of hearings, it has not yet introduced a bill to regulate it. In a phone interview with CNBC, Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat from California who is on the committee, said that he hopes Congress will pass a bill this year.
Rep. Gomez said of Amazon’s announcement, “It’s a good first step, but it’s still not enough.”
“They say, ‘We’ve been asking Congress to put limits on how this technology can be used,’ but every time we tried to get more information, they stopped us, so we had to hold hearings to move the issue forward.
Gomez says that the committee wanted to know more about the technology and to who Amazon sells it.
Two days before Amazon’s announcement, IBM said it was getting out of the facial recognition business, and CEO Arvind Krishna asked Congress to make changes to promote racial justice and fight systemic racism. On Monday, Democratic lawmakers also introduced a broad bill to change how the police work. On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on how to stop police brutality.
Floyd, a black man who was unarmed, was killed by a police officer on May 25. A video shows that the officer kneeled on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. In the days since, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, has spoken out in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and posted e-mails with customers who disagree with his position.
Even before the recent wave of protests against police violence across the country, Amazon’s work on Rekognition was already a controversial subject. Law enforcement agencies have used the technology, and it was reportedly shown to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Amazon Web Services has said in the past that groups that work with law enforcement to help crime victims use the technology.
The only police department named on AWS’s website as a Rekognition customer is the Washington County Sheriff Office in Oregon. Amazon refused to say how many police departments use Rekognition as a whole.
In a short blog post from 2016, AWS introduced Rekognition as a “service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications” and to “find objects, scenes, and faces in images.” Amazon said last year that Rekognition could tell if someone was scared by looking at their face.
Research has shown that facial recognition software may have a bias against people of color and women. Last year, Joy Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, talked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about her research on the subject. Her research helped give Amazon shareholders a reason to vote last year on whether or not to sell the technology to government agencies. About 2.4% of shareholders voted in favor of this.
Ring is a smart doorbell security company that is owned by Amazon. A tracker on its website shows that more than 1,000 police departments in the U.S. work with Ring. Because the partnerships make it possible for police to ask Ring security cameras for footage, privacy concerns have been raised.
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