Amazon pauses police use of Rekognition for a year
On 10 June 2020 Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial recognition technology. Access was kept for Thorn, the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Marinus Analytics, which look for trafficking victims and missing children. The company said the year should give Congress time to put rules in place.
Why it matters
A face recognition service that United States police could buy from a cloud provider closed that market to itself for a fixed term, though a researcher of police use told Al Jazeera that Amazon was not a major player in the field. Unlike IBM's exit two days earlier this is not a withdrawal but a pause with a condition attached: it is tied explicitly to whether the legislature acts in time.
The statement is short, a few paragraphs under the byline Amazon Staff rather than a named person. It says the company had already argued for stronger regulation of the ethical use of facial recognition and that in recent days Congress appears ready to take on the challenge. The record does not claim the moratorium was later extended: this statement says nothing of the kind and the batch holds no other source for it. Nor does it give a count of the police departments that had been using the service; the statement gives no such number. The date comes from the page's own metadata, which gives a publication time on 10 June 2020; the visible text carries no date. Al Jazeera, reporting on 11 June 2020, quotes the researcher Clare Garvie: by her public-records research only two agencies were using or testing Rekognition, the Orlando Police Department, which tested it and did not deploy it, and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon, which suspended its use.