Major Facial Recognition AI companies pause deployment

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests; companies that had previously defended their facial recognition products began to reconsider their approach. IBM announced that it would no longer offer facial recognition, Amazon said it would pause selling its facial recognition to police for a year, and Microsoft announced Thursday that it would not sell its facial recognition technology to police “until there is a federal law regulating the technology,” the Washington Post reported.

The message is now clear: Even tech giants like Amazon, IBM, and Google, which had earlier decided not to offer a facial recognition API, do not think this technology is ready for use by police.

It’s important to remember, though, that companies like IBM and Amazon are the tip of the facial recognition iceberg. Many U.S. police departments with facial recognition tools didn’t buy them from big tech companies but rather from smaller contractors that claim to use “forensic” facial recognition algorithms developed by companies like NEC, Rank One, and Cognitec. DataWorks Plus, for example, develops the database technology to analyze mugshots and other face photos and then licenses the facial recognition algorithms of NEC, Rank One, and Cognitec.