Amazon has prolonged its ban on offering facial-recognition expertise to regulation enforcement indefinitely.
The corporate declined to elaborate on the choice, nevertheless it comes a couple of week after civil liberties teams referred to as on Amazon to “completely ban regulation enforcement from utilizing Amazon’s facial recognition software program, Rekognition.” As Forbes reviews, it is also every week earlier than a Might 26 shareholder assembly, the place a “shareholder proposal is asking for an impartial third-party audit on the dangers linked with authorities use of Rekognition.”
In June 2020, because the nation was up in arms over the homicide of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Amazon introduced a one-year moratorium on providing Rekognition for “police use.” On the time, it mentioned it hoped the pause would “give Congress sufficient time to implement applicable guidelines.” Microsoft made an identical pledge on the time.
Whereas some US cities, from Portland, Maine, to San Francisco, have banned using facial-recognition tech by regulation enforcement, laws has not but handed on the federal degree.
Greater than three dozen civil liberties teams argued in a Might 10 letter {that a} yr after Floyd’s dying, “the issue of police violence in opposition to the Black group persists. Almost 200 Black folks have been killed by police because the homicide of George Floyd. Permitting police to make use of Rekognition, a harmful surveillance software, poses a risk to the protection of Black communities and others who’re already being unfairly focused and surveilled by regulation enforcement.”
The teams pointed to outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos’ June 2020 assertion that he was “blissful to lose” racist prospects over his help of Black Lives Matter. “It’s unimaginable to promote surveillance tech to regulation enforcement, and likewise stand in solidarity with Black lives,” they wrote. “We urge you to do the best factor: make the ban on police use of Rekognition everlasting and abolish surveillance expertise.”
In a Tuesday assertion, the ACLU praised the prolonged Rekognition moratorium. “Now, the Biden administration and legislatures throughout the nation should additional shield communities from the hazards of this expertise by ending its use by regulation enforcement solely, regardless which firm is promoting it,” mentioned Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privateness, and Know-how Challenge.
It isn’t laborious to search out tales about facial recognition gone awry in police work. Final yr, Detroit police arrested the incorrect man primarily based on facial-recognition outcomes, whereas Amazon’s personal system has been proven to have a racial-bias downside.