In June, Amazon announced that it was issuing a moratorium on police use of its controversial facial recognition software, called Rekognition, which it had sold to law enforcement for years in defiance of privacy advocates. The move marked a remarkable retreat for Amazon’s famously stubborn CEO. And he wasn’t alone.
IBM pledged that same week to stop developing facial recognition entirely, and Microsoft committed to withholding its system from police until federal regulations were passed. These decisions occurred amid widespread international protests over systemic racism, sparked by the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
But the groundwork had been laid four years earlier, when Joy Buolamwini, then a 25-year-old graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, began looking into the racial, skin type, and gender disparities embedded in commercially available facial recognition technologies.
Her research culminated in two groundbreaking, peer-reviewed studies, published in 2018 and 2019, that revealed how systems from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and others were unable to classify darker female faces as accurately as those of white men—effectively shattering the myth of machine neutrality.
Today, Buolamwini is galvanizing a growing movement to expose the social consequences of artificial intelligence. Through her nearly four-year-old nonprofit, the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), she has testified before lawmakers at the federal, state, and local levels about the dangers of using facial recognition technologies with no oversight of how they’re created or deployed.
Since George Floyd’s death, she has called for a complete halt to police use of face surveillance and is providing activists with resources and tools to demand regulation. Many companies, such as Clearview AI, are still selling facial analysis to police and government agencies.
And many police departments are using facial recognition technologies to identify, in the words of the New York Police Department, individuals that have committed, are committing, or are about to commit crimes. “We already have law enforcement that is imbued with systemic racism,” Buolamwini says.
“The last thing we need is for this presumption of guilt of people of colour, of Black people, to be confirmed erroneously through an algorithm.” For Buolamwini, Big Tech’s pause on developing this technology is not nearly enough. As the Black Lives Matter protests took hold during the summer, she used her platform to call on technology companies to donate at least $1 million each to organizations such as Data for Black Lives and Black in AI that advance racial justice in the tech sector.
The AJL released a white paper exploring the concept of an FDA-like authority to oversee facial recognition technologies. And the nonprofit, which has received grants in the past from the Ford and MacArthur Foundations, just received fresh funding from the Sloane and Rockefeller Foundations to create a set of tools to help people report harmful AI systems. “There truly are no safeguards that can guarantee there won’t be an abuse of power of these tools,” Buolamwini says. That’s where the AJL comes in.
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