Microsoft and Amazon follow IBM's lead... sort of

After IBM exited the facial recognition business earlier in the week, while also calling on Congress, "to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies," Amazon and Microsoft have both announced moratoria on the use of their facial recognition systems by law enforcement agencies.

Amazon was second out of the gate after IBM, followed by Microsoft, according to Reuters:

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it would await federal regulation before selling facial recognition technology to police, making it the latest big firm to back away from the business following protests against law enforcement brutality and bias.

The announcement came shortly after rival Amazon.com Inc declared it was pausing police use of its "Rekognition" service for a year and International Business Machines Corp said it no longer offers the software generally.

In a statement, Microsoft said it has worked on enacting principles and legislation for the software's use.

"We do not sell our facial recognition technology to U.S. police departments today, and until there is a strong national law grounded in human rights, we will not sell this technology to police," the company said. The Washington Post first reported the news.

Obviously IBM's statement was much stronger, but IBM also wasn't a major player in facial recognition before killing it, so their decision to exit the space actually doubles as a cost-cutting move. Amazon and Microsoft, on the other hand, actually do have facial recognition businesses, so it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that they both announced one-year suspensions of their facial recognition development, rather than complete cancellation.

Still, with current opinion polls in the U.S. pointing at a Democratic Party landslide, barring actual electoral fraud by governing Republican officials, it's entirely possible that Congress might decide to ban the use of facial recognition by law enforcement entirely. If so, then Amazon's and Microsoft's moratoria would also serve as a loss-prevention measure, saving them huge sums of money that would otherwise have been spent developing a technology whose days may well be numbered.

These are all businesses, people; any principled actions they announce will also make business sense for them.  Still... baby steps.