When Amazon announced a one-year ban on its facial recognition tools for police, it should’ve been a well-earned win for Deborah Raji, a black researcher who helped publish an influential study pointing out the racial and gender bias with Amazon’s Rekognition.
Amazon called for governments to place stronger regulations on the technology. Nowhere in its post on Wednesday did the company acknowledge Raji’s work, which found that Rekognition incorrectly identified women as men 19% of the time.
“For them to write about this moratorium and not reference our work, or the ACLU’s work to call them out in the first place, it’s just been really frustrating for them to not acknowledge the role of that research,” Raji said. “Prior to that callout, they were not saying anything about facial recognition.”