Ibm CEO Arvind Krishna addressed the letter to Congress today. The company will no longer develop or research the technology, IBM says.

Ibm opposes and will not condone uses of facial recognition technology, including mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms.

Facial recognition software has improved greatly over the last decade thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. At the same time the technology has been shown to suffer from bias along lines of age, race, and ethnicity.

In 2018, research by joy buolamwini and timnit gebru revealed the extent to which many commercial facial recognition systems were biased. This work and the pair’s subsequent studies led to mainstream criticism of these algorithms and ongoing attempts to rectify bias.

A December 2019 National Institute of standards and technology study found evidence for the existence of a wide range of accuracy across demographic differences. The technology has also come under fire for its role in privacy violations.

In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union found that ReKognition incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to faces picked from 25,000 public mugshots.

Clearview ai has been issued numerous cease and desist orders. It is at the center of a number of privacy lawsuits. Facebook was also ordered in January to pay $ 550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its unlawful use of facial recognition technology.

Ibm was also found to be sharing a training data set of nearly one million photos in January 2019 taken from Flickr without the consent of the subjects. The data set would only be accessed by verified researchers and only included images that were publicly available.

In his letter, Krishna argued that more police misconduct cases should be put under the purview of federal court and that Congress should make changes to qualified immunity doctrine.