Amazon will extend its ban on police use of its face-recognition technology beyond the one-year pause it announced last 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," the company said at the time. Facial recognition software has often been criticised for its bias against people with darker skin, which could lead to law enforcement investigating innocent citizens - and, in the United States, has been one of the factors in wrongful arrests. A National Institute of Standards and Technology study tested 189 algorithms from 99 developers and found that black and Asian faces were ten to 100 times more likely to be falsely identified by the algorithms compared to white faces. As such, Amazon and other technology companies are under pressure from civil rights activists and their own workers to halt the sale of face-recognition systems to law enforcement agencies.