Amazon Rekognition ban slammed for being ‘performative’

A company’s response to the protests in the US has been blasted as a marketing gesture, as a rival is dragged into the debate.

Amazon’s announcement that it would stop letting police use its facial recognition technology for a year has been branded as “performative” by a US politician.

Californian congressman Jimmy Gomez has also claimed the company has been ignoring his questions about the software for years.

While brands scramble to have their say on the BlackLivesMatter movement (with many voicing support but seemingly few opening their wallets to help), Amazon made a brief announcement that it would stop letting police using its “Rekognition” software.

But not everyone is happy about it.

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Amazon announced a temporary pause on law enforcement agencies using its facial recognition technology last week. Picture: Kerem Yucel/AFP

Some turned on Amazon for taking away the software from law enforcement.

Others, as is often the case when brands take a stand on social issues, doubted the sincerity of the gesture.

A prominent new voice has emerged in that field in the form of politician Jimmy Gomez.

He’s slammed the moratorium as a “performative” gesture and blasted Amazon for ignoring the questions he’s been trying to ask them about the software for two years.

“Your company said it supports federal regulation for facial recognition technology and ‘stand(s) ready to help if requested,’” Mr Gomez said in an open letter to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

“In the spirit of that offer, I write to request information on the implementation of the moratorium, and resubmit a list of questions I have asked your company over the course of nearly two years on public safety and civil rights concerns associated with Amazon’s facial recognition technology – questions that have largely gone ignored or woefully unaddressed,” he said.

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A Washington County Sheriff's Office Deputy demonstrates how his agency uses Amazon’s facial recognition software. Picture: Gillian Flaccus/AP

Mr Gomez added the announcement was encouraging but ambiguous and “raises more questions than answers”.

He said the blog post announcing the moratorium on use by police didn’t address whether Amazon would stop selling the software to them for use later, whether it would pause development on the software, whether it extended to federal agencies not just local police, whether it applied to current contracts already in place, and whether the company would submit it to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for testing.

That institute has been testing a variety of facial recognition software with the aim of informing policy makers about how to regulate the technology.

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The accuracy of facial recognition software depends on the faces it’s been trained to recognise.

Facial recognition software is yet to be perfected (debate rages on whether it ever should be) and various algorithms tested by the NIST have been shown to “exhibit demographic differentials” – meaning they are better at recognising the faces of some genders and races than others.

“Corporations have been quick to share expressions of support for the Black Lives Matter movement … unfortunately, too many of these gestures have been performative at best,” Mr Gomez said.

“Calling on Congress to regulate facial recognition technology is one of these gestures.”

Mr Gomez said Amazon had a unique opportunity as an industry leader to put “substantive action” behind its statements of solidarity by “not selling a flawed product to police, and instead, play a critical role in ending systemic racism in our nation’s criminal justice system”.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said he’s willing to come to Congress to testify as part of an antitrust investigation into big tech companies.

If he does make his debut testifying to Congress he’ll join a storied list of other tech heads including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg fronted Congress in 2018. Picture: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP

Mr Gates’ former company has also found itself in the headlines alongside Amazon after revelations about its own facial recognition deals with law enforcement agencies.

In April last year Microsoft president Brad Smith said the company had denied a California law enforcement agency access to the software, believing it would lead to innocent women and minorities being disproportionately and incorrectly identified because the artificial intelligence has been trained on mostly white and male pictures.

New emails uncovered by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) show Microsoft had been “aggressively” marketing its own facial recognition software to federal law enforcement agencies, which apparently declined to use Microsoft’s software before the company changed its stance.

“It is troubling enough to learn that Microsoft tried to sell a dangerous technology to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) given that agency’s record spearheading the racist drug war, and even more disturbing now that Attorney-General Bill Barr has reportedly expanded this very agency’s surveillance authorities, which could be abused to spy on people protesting police brutality,” ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project senior lawyer Nathan Freed Wessler said in a statement.