It has been sold to, and used by, a number of United States government agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Orlando, Florida police, as well as private entities.
[20] On June 26, 2018, it was reported that the Orlando police force had ceased using Rekognition after their trial contract expired, reserving the right to use it in the future.
[14] In July 2018, the ACLU released a test showing that Rekognition had falsely matched 28 members of Congress with mugshot photos, particularly Congresspeople of color.
[23] On December 1, 2018, it was reported that 8 Democratic lawmakers had said in a letter that Amazon had "failed to provide sufficient answers" about Rekognition, writing that they had "serious concerns that this type of product has significant accuracy issues, places disproportionate burdens on communities of color, and could stifle Americans' willingness to exercise their First Amendment rights in public.
"[25] In January 2019, MIT researchers published a peer-reviewed study asserting that Rekognition had more difficulty in identifying dark-skinned females than competitors such as IBM and Microsoft.
Amazon in response defended its use of Rekognition, but supported new federal oversight and guidelines to "make sure facial recognition technology cannot be used to discriminate.
[27][28] In March 2019, an open letter regarding Rekognition was sent by a group of prominent AI researchers to Amazon, criticizing its sale to law enforcement[26] with around 50 signatures.
[34][35][36] In June 2020, Amazon announced it was implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition, in response to the George Floyd protests.
[38] The DOJ's AI inventory revealed the FBI's "Project Tyr" aims to customize Rekognition to identify nudity, weapons, explosives, and other information from lawfully acquired media.
The authors hypothesized that this discrepancy is due principally to Megvii, IBM, and Microsoft having more light males than dark females in their training data, i.e. dataset bias.