IBM stops selling general purpose face recognition
On 8 June 2020 IBM's chief executive Arvind Krishna sent five members of the United States Congress a letter of proposals on police reform in which he stated that IBM no longer offers general purpose facial recognition or analysis software. The company said it opposes the use of any such technology, including other vendors', for mass surveillance, racial profiling and violations of human rights.
Why it matters
A company publicly left a market it had helped create, and did so not under regulation but in a week of protests. In the atlas this is the first record of a vendor withdrawing a capability from sale: every earlier one describes a capability arriving rather than going away.
The letter is addressed to Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and Representatives Karen Bass, Hakeem Jeffries and Jerrold Nadler. Besides the section on technology it proposes measures on police accountability for misconduct, a federal registry of such cases and changes to the qualified immunity doctrine, along with proposals on skills and education. In the technology section IBM calls for a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition should be employed by domestic law enforcement, and separately for AI systems to be tested for bias with that testing audited and reported. The record does not claim that IBM ended all work on faces: the letter speaks of general purpose facial recognition and analysis software specifically. Nor does it claim that any live contracts were terminated; the letter mentions none. IBM's page carrying the letter no longer exists, so the record cites an archival copy of it taken on 24 June 2020.