Amazon put out a blog post today saying they're pausing police use of Rekognition, their facial recognition service, for one year. Not banning it. Pausing it. One year, starting today, June 10th 2020. IBM went further two days ago: their CEO sent a letter to Congress saying IBM is getting out of the facial recognition business entirely, full stop, no more general purpose facial recognition or analysis software, period. Two very different moves dressed up as roughly the same headline this week, and I've been turning both of them over since I saw the Amazon post this morning.
I should say upfront I have actual hands-on experience with Rekognition, which is more than I can say for most of the takes flying around today. About a year and a half ago I built a dumb little weekend project to auto-tag my personal photo library, mostly so I could search "beach" or "dog" instead of scrolling through four thousand unsorted vacation pics. Rekognition's free tier gives you something like 1,000 images a month for the first year, then it's roughly a dollar per thousand images after that for label detection, which is genuinely cheap. I ran maybe 600 photos through it one Saturday afternoon with a cheap Python script and a cup of coffee going cold next to my keyboard.
Here's the thing nobody mentions when they write the "Amazon does the right thing" post: the labels it spits back are confident and wrong constantly. My black cat got tagged as "Dog" more than once, which is funny in isolation but also just... not close? A photo of my neighbor's kid at a July 4th barbecue two summers back came back with an age range guess, a gender guess, and an "emotion: possibly happy" tag, none of which I asked for and all of which felt like a weird thing for software to decide about a stranger's kid. That's a harmless hobby project running against snapshots I took myself. It is not a cop on a street corner running the same engine against a crowd in real time trying to decide who to stop.
That gap is really the whole issue, and it's why I don't think a one-year pause is the win people are treating it as this afternoon. There was that well-known test the ACLU ran a couple years back where Rekognition matched a chunk of sitting members of Congress to mugshots — wrongly, obviously — and the error rate was worse for darker-skinned faces, which lines up with what researchers like Joy Buolamwini had already been documenting on facial analysis tools generally. Amazon disputed some of the ACLU's methodology at the time, sure, fine. But "the tool has known, documented accuracy problems that break down worse along racial lines" isn't exactly a settled dispute either, and none of that changed between yesterday and today. What changed is two weeks of protests after George Floyd's death and a news cycle that made this the worst possible week to be seen selling face-scanning software to police departments.
A year is a strange number to land on if the goal is actually fixing something. It's long enough that this week's headlines are gone, and it conveniently punts the real decision to whoever's paying attention in June of next year, which, if I'm honest, might be nobody, because something else will be the news by then. If Amazon wanted this to read as a genuine policy shift rather than a pressure release valve, "until Congress passes federal legislation regulating this" would've said a lot more than "for one year." IBM's move at least has a shape to it you can hold onto: they're out, permanently, of a product category. Amazon's is a snooze button.
Small unrelated complaint while I'm here: if you've never poked around the AWS console, do yourself a favor and brace for it. Finding the actual Rekognition usage and billing numbers for my little photo project took longer than writing the script itself, buried three menus deep under a UI clearly designed by people who use it forty hours a week and have long since stopped noticing how unfriendly it is to anyone else. Not the point of this post, but it's been bugging me for a year and a half and I needed to say it somewhere.
Anyway. Mark your calendars for next June, I guess, and we'll see if anyone remembers to check.