Amazon extends ban on police use of its facial recognition technology indefinitely
The firm said in June its freeze would last a year to ‘give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules.’ No federal laws have been passed since.
By Drew Harwell
The Washington Post
May 18, 2021 at 2:32 p.m. CDT
Amazon is extending its global ban on police use of its facial recognition software until further notice, the company said Tuesday, prolonging a one-year moratorium on a surveillance technology that has stirred controversy because of its problems with racial bias and false arrests.
The tech giant said in June, amid nationwide protests over racial injustice and police violence, that it was instituting a one-year police ban of its software, Rekognition, to “give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules” governing the technology’s ethical use.
On Tuesday, the company said it was extending the ban indefinitely. An Amazon spokesperson declined to provide any further detail. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Though lawmakers have proposed some limited federal regulations in the months since, Congress has yet to pass any laws related to police facial recognition use. More than a dozen cities and states, however, have enacted laws banning or restricting the technology’s use by public officials or local police.
Council members in King County, Wash., where Amazon’s Seattle headquarters is based, are considering a local ban this month. And in Virginia, where Amazon is building its second headquarters, known as HQ2, state lawmakers just enacted one of the strictest laws in the country, requiring local law enforcement to secure state legislative approval before using any facial recognition system.
Rekognition had been sold to local police departments as a way for officers to upload an image of a potential suspect and quickly scan for matches across a database of hundreds of thousands of jail mug shots or other photos.
Its first client, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, told The Washington Post in 2019 that it had run more than 1,000 searches through the system in the previous year, including photos from store surveillance cameras and Facebook profiles.
But the technology has been widely criticized for its potential for error, particularly after researchers found that Amazon’s system, like other facial recognition software, was more likely to return false matches when analyzing people of color. Amazon has disputed those findings.
Police have also been found to use edited photos, sketches and other distorted images while searching for potential suspects, raising the risks of faulty results.
Three men, all of whom are Black, have sued U.S. police departments for false arrests tied to facial recognition mismatches. All three cases are ongoing.
Amazon is one of many companies that has marketed facial recognition technology for sale: Hundreds of similar facial recognition algorithms have been developed, some of which are being promoted for police, commercial or personal use. IBM and Microsoft stopped selling the technology to police last year.
The FBI and other federal agencies have run hundreds of thousands of facial recognition searches in the past decade, government data shows. Some companies now allow anyone to run facial recognition searches.
Jay Greene contributed to this report.
Amazon extends ban on police use of its facial recognition technology indefinitely - The Washington Post |
