A police officer wearing a body camera via Getty Images
Axon, the largest manufacturer of police body cameras in the United States announced Thursday that it will not add facial recognition to law enforcement body cameras until ethics issues have been resolved.
“It’s not a technology we believe we should be commercializing right now, the tech and the ethics aren’t lined up,” Axon CEO Rick Smith, told Forbes.
“The accuracy and bias issues that are present today are likely to be solved in the future and that will leave another set of hurdles,” Smith says. “Once this technology is accurate, we’ll then need to figure out the ethical use constraints.”
Axon, (formerly Taser International, named for its initial electroshock product) worked closely with its ethics board, which is engaged with “members of the civil rights community” including the ACLU, Smith says. The decision is based on a 42-page report from the Axon’s AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board, which it formed last year.
The ACLU commended Axon on its decision to hold back on facial recognition technology in a statement that cited the Body Camera Accountability Act, which prohibits the use of facial recognition and other biometric surveillance on law enforcement body cameras. The bill passed in California in May, and was approved by the Senate in June.
Smith says that legislation might seem like a step in the right direction, but there is value in companies considering the impact of their technology before the threat of government intervention.
“This [decision] was not largely influenced by legislation,” Smith says. “We do see that self-regulating like this can lead to better legislation over the long haul. If we went out and started selling facial recognition in body cameras because we could, with all the issues today, that would lead to knee-jerk legislation, that can be counterproductive long term.”
In this, Axon is an outlier. Competitors are willing to sell the technology to law enforcement. In May, Amazon’s shareholders voted against prohibiting the company to selling its Rekognition tool, shown to have gender and race-based bias, to the government. Axon ethics board member Barry Friedman says he doesn’t expect the company’s abstinence on facial recognition technology to hurt the company’s bottom line.
“It’s not obvious to me that if the industry did the right thing, that corporate profits would plummet,” Barry Friedman, who is also director of the Policing Project at New York University, told Forbes. “Just because we invented a technology, doesn’t mean we need to throw it into use tomorrow,” he added.
Axon’s Q1’19 revenue was up 14% year over year to $116 million, $50 million of which came from the sale of body cameras. The company emerged as a leader in electroshock weapons with Tasers in the ‘90s and has gone on to develop more high-tech tools, like Redaction Studio, which uses AI to find and blur out faces in video footage used by the police. Redacting identities, in some cases, allows the footage to be shared publicly, with the hope of increasing transparency.
Axon will continue to use face tracking technology, Smith says. Algorithms can re-identify a single individual moving through body cam footage. The development of a database of images has the potential for mass government surveillance. For now, Axon’s use of face tracking in processing body camera footage serves as a more basic tool.
“Let’s say there’s a police shooting and there’s public outcry to release the video, the police have to go in and redact faces, in some cases they only want to redact certain faces, but they need to leave others intact, in that case, you want to be able to teach the software,’this face.’ Redact this face from all videos, but ‘this face over here, do not’.”
Smith says this version of face recognition in policing could promote transparency, but it is still forthcoming, which is why he’s against blanket laws that ban the technology altogether.
“This is a case where some customers may be swayed by a competitor offering [facial recognition] and we don’t, but we think doing the right thing builds a stronger business,” said Smith.
