Amazon has extended a moratorium on law enforcement using its facial recognition software “until further notice,” Reuters reported. The ban was set to expire in June.
Back in 2018, Amazon employees pushed the company to scale back the program, arguing that racial bias documented in facial recognition could exacerbate police violence against minorities. Amazon defended the program until June 2020, when pressure from widespread protests increased, leading the company to announce it was suspending the service for police customers for a year.
Rekognition is offered as an AWS service, as are many of Amazon’s cloud competitors. Microsoft announced the day after Amazon’s pledge that it also would not sell its facial recognition services to the police, while IBM said the same week that it would stop developing or researching facial recognition technology altogether. Google is not making its facial recognition technology commercially available to anyone.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the ban had been extended. In a statement accompanying the initial law enforcement ban, Amazon said it hoped Congress would use the one-year moratorium to implement rules around the ethical use of facial recognition technology. Part of its statement reads as follows.
We’ve long argued for stronger government regulations governing the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress seems ready to take up the challenge. We hope this one-year pause may give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if asked.
So far, no federal legislation has addressed the use of facial recognition by police, but some state and local measures have passed to reduce the use of the technology. In May 2019, San Francisco became the first US city to ban government use of facial recognition, and Oakland soon followed suit. Oregon and Portland, Maine, also passed legislation around the technology in late 2020. Massachusetts failed to pass a proposed ban in December 2020, but recently passed a revised bill that adds some restrictions to the use of facial recognition by police.