IBM stops selling general-purpose facial recognition

In a letter to Congress amid the nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna announced the company was sunsetting its general-purpose facial recognition and analysis products and would no longer develop or research the technology. Krishna wrote that IBM “firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency.” The letter paired the announcement with a call for federal policing reforms, including narrowing qualified immunity and moving more police misconduct cases into federal courts.

IBM’s move came roughly a year and a half after research by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru had shown commercial facial recognition systems, including IBM’s own, performed markedly worse on darker-skinned and female faces, and months after the New York Times had reported on Clearview AI’s unregulated police sales. IBM’s own facial recognition business was already comparatively small; the announcement carried more weight as a public position than as a commercial retreat.

The timing set off a rapid cascade: Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its Rekognition system two days later, and Microsoft said the following day it would not sell facial recognition to police departments until federal regulation was in place. Civil liberties groups welcomed the announcements as concessions that the technology’s use by law enforcement was unacceptably risky, while others criticised the moratoriums, as opposed to outright bans, as reversible and unenforceable — a distinction sharpened seven weeks later when Detroit’s wrongful arrest of Robert Williams became the first widely reported case of a false facial-recognition match leading to an arrest in the United States.