In the wake of protests around the death of George Floyd, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon are now denying police departments access to their facial recognition technology.
In the wake of protests around the death of George Floyd, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon are now denying police departments access to their facial recognition technology.
Some have hailed facial recognition technology as a great boon to law enforcement while others say the technology not only violates privacy rights, but is prone to errors with females and people of color.
And it’s no coincidence that all three companies have made recent announcements in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and the national conversation about police violence against African Americans and other people of color
On Thursday, Microsoft President Brad Smith said “We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology.”
This followed Amazon’s Wednesday announcement that it’s implementing “ a one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology,” though the company “will continue to allow organizations like Thorn, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and Marinus Analytics to use Amazon Rekognition to help rescue human trafficking victims and reunite missing children with their families.
