Updated with Microsoft news:

Amazon Web Services Inc. today said it’s placing a one-year moratorium on police use of its already controversial facial recognition technology platform, Amazon Rekognition.

The announcement comes just two days after Amazon’s cloud rival IBM Corp. said it would no longer develop or offer its own facial recognition technology to anyone. IBM cited potential human rights and privacy abuses as its reason for abandoning the market. Moreover, it said facial recognition technology remains biased regarding certain factors such as age, ethnicity and race.

Update: On Thursday morning, Microsoft Corp. announced that it too will not sell its facial recognition technology to police departments, until there’s a national law in place,” grounded in human rights that will govern this technology,” said President Brad Smith. He also noted that Microsoft had not so far sold the technology to law enforcement organizations.

Much of the criticism of facial recognition technology comes from MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini and Microsoft Research’s Timnit Gebru, who co-authored a lengthy research paper on the subject of bias. They found that the error rates for most facial recognition systems were dozens of percentage points higher when trying to identify darker skinned people, compared to white-skinned individuals. The New York Times, which reported on the study, said at the time the biggest issue seems to be the training data used to teach the system.

AWS didn’t give a specific reason for the moratorium of police use of Rekognition, but instead called for federal regulation of the technology. It said it will continue providing the software to rights groups dedicated to searching for missing and exploited children, and for those combating human trafficking.

Left unsaid is that Amazon’s real reason is likely to be the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police officers in Minnesota last month. That killing led to the ongoing protests in the U.S. and elsewhere against racism and police brutality.

The company has apparently decided that the police cannot be trusted to use Rekognition in a responsible way. AWS has never said how many police departments are using the platform, but at least two — in Florida and Oregon – are known to use it.

“The death of George Floyd was horrific and has sparked serious demands for reforming and deescalating the militarization of police departments,” said Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. “Removing access to a technology that can be used for repressive purposes is a sensible move that reflects Amazon’s and IBM’s sensitivity to the situation and their desire to be on the right side of history.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE it was a sign of the unusual times we live in that Amazon is pausing a technology while waiting for legislature to govern its use to catch up.

“As valid the pause may look right now in light of current events, it is an inflection point regarding how technology vendors negotiate delicate technology questions,” Mueller said. “The future will tell if this was the right move.”

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

Photo: Eden, Janine and Jim/Flickr