Facial Recognition Is Here To Stay, But Can We Control Its Use?

Three days ago, in a letter to members of the United States Congress, IBM announced that it was abandoning the development of general-purpose facial recognition technologies because of their potential for mass surveillance, human rights violations and racial discrimination. In his letter, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called for a reconsideration of the sale of this kind of technology to law enforcement, a gesture with which the company, which after all was announcing the abandonment of a technology in which it is not a leader and that has little impact on its bottom line, managed to put pressure on the companies that do have contracts with those law enforcement agencies, notably Amazon and Microsoft. The next day, Timnit Gebru, one of the leaders of Google's artificial intelligence team, said in an interview with the New York Times that the use of facial recognition technologies by law enforcement or security forces should be banned for the moment, and that he did not know how the issue would evolve in the future. One day later, on Wednesday 10, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on the police's use of its facial recognition technology, the controversial Rekognition, so as to continue improving it and, above all, to give the government time to reach a reasonable consensus and establish stricter regulations for its ethical use. The company will continue to facilitate the use of this technology by institutions that use it for other purposes, such as preventing human trafficking or reuniting missing children with their families, but will temporarily stop offering it to the police and law enforcement agencies, one of its main customers.