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This time last year, tech industry heavyweights announced they would stop selling facial recognition tech to law enforcement until Congressional oversight caught up. One year later, Congress still hasn't regulated the tech.
Since then, multiple Black men have been wrongfully arrested due to facial recognition. One faulty match left a Detroit man jailed for 10 days. Congress proposed facial recognition regulation last June, but it never made it to a vote.
An update: Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), one of the 2020 bill’s co-sponsors, told us to expect the proposal to resurface.
“We can’t keep assuming that private companies like Amazon will implement their own moratoriums on technology that isn’t ready for prime time,” Merkley said. “That’s why I will soon be reintroducing the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, so we can establish a federal moratorium on the technology until critical safeguards are put in place to prevent bias and protect Americans’ right to privacy.”
How we got here
Last June, amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, three major tech companies temporarily suspended police use of their facial recognition tech, which research has proven to be biased against people with darker skin tones. Activists said the bans were too little too late coming from the companies that developed and popularized the tech to begin with.
All three companies pointed the finger at lax government regulation:
- On June 9, 2020, IBM announced it would prohibit use of its facial recognition software for “mass surveillance or racial profiling” and offered to help Congress regulate the tech.
- The next day, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial recognition technology, in hopes it “might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules.”
- And a day later, Microsoft said it would not sell the tech to US police departments “until we have a national law” to govern the tech.
Weeks later...Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ed Markey (D-MA) proposed the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced it in the House. The bill sought to prohibit federal use of “any biometric surveillance system”—and thwart funding for state and local governments that use it anyway.
Several jurisdictions have banned police use of facial recognition over the last year, including cities in California, Massachusetts, and Mississippi. Last September, Portland, Oregon, passed the broadest facial recognition ban in the US—prohibiting use by police, hotels, restaurants, and retail businesses.
Bottom line: Until national regulation is passed, the companies that make facial recognition technology are largely in control of who gets to use it and how.—HF