Amazon forbids police to use its face recognition technology

Amazon has introduced an annual moratorium on law enforcement access to its highly controversial Rekognition system. About this company yesterday announced on my blog. And this is only two days after a similar statement by IBM, which decided to stop the development of its similar technology.

Under pressure from the public, companies agreed that such systems could be used to promote discrimination and lead to a violation of human rights and freedoms. So far, A.I. has been completely rid of racial and gender biases. does not work.

The flaws of modern face recognition systems are best described by Joy Buolamvini, a scientist at MIT, and Timnit Gebra from Microsoft Research. In his work they determined that all AI systems, including those from Microsoft and IBM, have prejudices against people with dark skin tones. The problem turned out to be that there are simply more images of white people on the Internet, and this information is mainly used when training machines.

The percentage of errors in the recognition of black people in the end was several times higher. This could lead to not very funny embarrassments. Especially in the case of Rekognition. Amazon sold its technology to police to quickly identify criminals in states like Washington, Oregon, and Florida. Although the public said that the system for such important tasks is not yet suitable. For example, in 2018, Rekognition mistook 28 U.S. congresses for criminals.

Criminals obviously!

In a different research In 2019, Buolamvini and co-author Debra Raj analyzed Rekognition and concluded that it was more difficult to recognize the gender of people with darker skin. Many black women counted as men. At the same time, there were almost no such errors for white people.

Amazon tried to refute such a study, but Buolamvini posted a very detailed longrid on Mediumexplaining what exactly happens to the system. Further, Joy’s findings were confirmed by a team of a dozen AI researchers who published open letter Amazon urging not to sell technology to law enforcement.

A little over a year has passed since then, and now, in the wake of protests in the USA, Bezos decided to take the time to finalize the system. At the same time, Amazon says that they will continue to offer Rekognition for entertainment (for example, it performed well in broadcasting royal weddings and sports matches). Also, human rights organizations that deal with issues of missing children and the fight against trafficking in human beings will continue to receive access to it for free.

At the same time, other systems widely used by the police remain. The most popular (far more successful than Rekognition) in the US is Clearview AI. This pretty secretive company recently sued for scanning photos from social networks and creating a database of more than 3 billion photos, which she sells to law enforcement agencies.