Tech giants love to portray themselves as forces for good and as the United States was gripped by anti-racism protests a number of them publicly disavowed selling controversial facial recognition technology to police forces.
Facial recognition has numerous applications that could simplify our lives as we've seen with Apple using it to unlock smartphones or in stores to replace cash registers.
But the technology has a dark side, with facial recognition integrated into China's massive public surveillance system and its social credit experiment where even minor infractions of public norms can result in sanctions.
As the protests spread across the United States about police violence and racism, pressure mounted on tech firms about the technology. Microsoft and Amazon announced they would suspend sales of facial recognition software to police forces while IBM said it would exit the business.
Privacy and rights groups worry about the implications of the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement.
- 'Extremely intrusive' technology -
"It is an extremely intrusive form of surveillance and can seriously undermine our freedoms and eventually our society as a whole," says Privacy International.
"The biggest danger is that this technology will be used for general, suspicionless surveillance systems," says for its part the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
It notes that US state governments hold extensive photo databases as part of their motor vehicle departments, which if combined with public surveillance or other cameras, could result in "a comprehensive system of identification and tracking".
In January 2020, a New York Times investigation pulled back the curtain on the activities of Californian startup Clearview AI, whose facial recognition tool "could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously".
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