Amazon Has Put a One Year Ban on Police Use of Facial Recognition Technology

E-commerce giant Amazon announced this week that the company has banned police from using its facial recognition technology Rekognition for one year.

“We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge,” Amazon said.

“We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.”

Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Ca., who serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform committee told CNBC in a phone interview he is hopeful Congress will pass a bill this year.

“It’s a good first step, but it’s still not enough,” said Rep. Gomez regarding Amazon’s move.

“They’re saying, ‘we’ve been asking Congress to put guardrails on the use of this technology,’ – but every time we tried to get more and more data they stalled – and we had to have hearings to make movement on the issue.”

According to Gomez, the committee has been seeking more information about the technology, and to whom Amazon sells it.

Amazon’s Amazon Web Services had launched Rekognition in 2016, describing it then as a “service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications” and to “detect objects, scenes, and faces in images.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.