Amazon is stopping the police from using facial recognition software.
What We Know
- With the protest putting pressure on tech companies to respond to the killing of George Floyd, Wednesday Amazon said its banning the police from using its facial recognition software for one year, due to the software holding racial and gender biases.
- In the past Amazon’s technology had been criticized for misidentifying people of color.
- According to the New York Times, multiple law enforcement agencies across the country use the facial recognition technology to identify suspects and missing children. Law enforcement agencies use facial recognition technology to identify suspects and missing children. The systems work by trying to match facial pattern data extracted from photos or video with those in databases like driver’s license records. The authorities used the technology to help identify the suspect in the mass shooting at a newspaper last year in Annapolis, Md.
- The A.C.L.U. tested Amazon’s technology using the head shots of members of Congress and comparing them against a database of publicly available mug shots. The group reported that the Amazon technology incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with people who had been arrested, amounting to a 5 percent error rate among legislators. At the time, Amazon disputed the findings, saying that the group had used its system differently than law enforcement customers did, the New York Times reported.
- Amazon says they have been fighting to convince Congress to put stricter regulations on the use of facial recognition. In recent week Congress seems ready to do just that. 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.”
- Representative Jimmy Gomez (D) argues that Amazon has not been as cooperative as they state. “They’re saying, ‘we’ve been asking Congress to put guardrails on the use of this technology,’ – but every time we tried to get more and more data they stalled – and we had to have hearings to make movement on the issue” he argued. The house committee has held a number of hearings on the use of facial recognition in the past, but it has not introduced a bill that regulates the technology. Rep. Gomez says the Amazon announcement is “a good first step but it’s still not enough.” He stated the committee have been seeking more information about the technology, and whom Amazon sells it.
Amazon’s announcement comes just days after IBM announced it was leaving the facial recognition business. The CEO of IBM Arvid Krishna, called on congress to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism.
