Responding to widespread demands for new restrictions on aggressive policing after the murder of George Floyd, Amazon stopped law enforcement against a face recognition platform for one year, the company said on Wednesday.

The company has been marketing its software platform, called Recognition, to law enforcement agencies for years, and that Short blog post announcing the change provided no explicit reason for the change in direction. The post noted that Amazon supports federal regulations on facial recognition technology, and that the company hopes the one-year moratorium “can give Congress enough time to implement the right rules.”

This step was taken two days after IBM announced that it was completely out of the face recognition business, citing ethical concerns over strong technology. In letter to Congress, the company’s chief executive, Arvind Krishna, wrote that “IBM is firmly opposed and will not condone the use of any [facial recognition] technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of human rights and freedoms, “or other purposes that conflict with the company’s core principles.

Cities across the country, including Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco, have banned the use of technology by public agencies directly over concerns that software, which uses machine learning algorithms to automatically detect human faces in digital video and match them with names, prizes too great a risk of privacy can be used responsibly.

A California law in 2019 prohibits the use of facial recognition software – and other biometric controls that can identify people with tattoos, gait or individual distinguished characteristics – on photos or videos collected by law enforcement agencies.

The text of the law summarizes concerns about the use of technology, calling potential broad applications as “functional equivalents by requiring everyone to show a personal photo identification card at any time that violates recognized constitutional rights,” regardless of consent. He added that its use risks creating a massive and unregulated database of Californians who have never been suspected of a crime, and “can reduce the exercise of freedom of speech in public places” because the identity of anyone in the crowd can be immediately seen.

Amazon has become one of the leading providers of face recognition technology for law enforcement agencies in recent years, a role that has drawn criticism. In June 2018, a branch of the Washington State Civil Liberties Union call the Seattle company to stop providing technology to the government, including local law enforcement.

The Amazon executive who oversees Recognition told reporters at “Frontline” PBS in February that the company did not know how many police departments were using the technology. “We have 165 services on our technology infrastructure platform,” said Andrew Jassy, ​​Amazon Web Services chief executive, “and you can use them in whatever combination you want.”

Fight for the Future, the digital rights group that has led the coalition calling for a direct ban on face recognition technology in all applications, said a one-year gap was not enough.

“This is nothing more than a public relations action from the Amazon,” Evan Greer, deputy director at Fight for the Future, said in a statement. Greer said that appeals to federal regulations are consistent with a strategy – familiar with the struggle for California’s privacy laws passed last year – where powerful technology companies lobby for broad federal regulations that are ultimately weaker than state-level regulations or city ​​of their business. .