It's been three months since the world was shaken by the brutal murder of George Floyd. The image of a white police officer kneeling on a black citizen for 8 minutes and 46 seconds are still fresh in America's collective memory. And unfortunately, it won't be the last one either. Racism in this country has deep roots. It is a festering wound that's either left ignored or treated with an infective medicine.

But that was before machine learning and big data empowered computers to make their own decisions.

On Wednesday, in a brief blog post, Amazon made a surprising announcement: that it would implement a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial recognition service, Rekognition. The post did not mention the furious nationwide demand for reform in response to the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many other Black people. But it did cite developments "in recent days" indicating that Congress seemed prepared to implement "stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology"--regulations that Amazon claims to be advocating for and ready to help shape in the coming year. But Amazon's sudden commitment to ostensibly transformative reform should be taken with a grain of salt hefty enough to unseat a Confederate monument from its rock-solid base. Americans won't receive the privacy and civil rights protections they need because a company like Amazon decides to give them to us.