Amazon must let shareholders have a say in selling of controversial facial recognition tech

Amazon can’t block its shareholders from a vote on the company’s controversial facial recognition technology.

In a letter to the e-commerce behemoth this week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) struck down an appeal from Amazon to block voting on proposals related to sales of Rekognition to government entities. The SEC says that Amazon must allow its shareholders to vote on these proposals.

The two proposals would speak to the concerns of shareholders, activists, and civil rights groups over the company’s facial recognition tool. The first proposal would stop Amazon from selling its Rekognition technology to governments unless the board approved of the sales. The second proposal would require an audit into the technology in order to research Rekognition’s effects on privacy and civil rights.

Amazon has been subject to intense criticism over Rekognition, particularly concerning who the company has been selling the facial recognition service to. The Seattle-based tech giant has sold Rekognition to local police forces and the FBI. It even sought to sell its services to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The company continues to deploy Rekognition to governments despite a study by the ACLU which found that the technology had could not correctly identifyi members of Congress. Even worse, the study discovered that the facial recognition tech suffered from racial bias.

It’s unlikely either proposal will receive the support it needs to pass. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos alone owns a sizeable share in the company. However, it is extremely noteworthy that the company sought the unusual move to block these proposals from even coming to a vote nonetheless.

In an attempt to address these issues, Amazon has released a set of guideline suggestions for possible future facial recognition regulation. However, as the ACLU points out, the company’s guidelines puts the onus of the technology on the entities using the tech, saw as law enforcement, and not on the service providers like Amazon.

Just this week, Amazon received a separate letter -- this one from dozens of top AI researchers from Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and even Amazon itself -- raising civil rights concerns with Rekognition and supporting the proposals laid out by shareholders.

Amazon shareholders will meet to vote on these proposals in May.