It was recently reported that Washington state county banned government use of facial recognition technology.

Indeed, last Tuesday, King County voted to stop using facial recognition systems, which are heavily criticized for their inherent bias towards people of colour. These systems are described as a threat to residents of the county, as they can lead to potential misidentification, bias, and the erosion of civil liberties.

Hence, it was decided that using this kind of technology is too dangerous and can have disastrous consequences on the lives of citizens.

The past few years have witnessed incredible pressure to limit or even remove the use of facial recognition technology as it is considered a powerful and biased surveillance tool. Many studies all over the US and UK have revealed that facial recognition software is proven to be less accurate with the faces of people of colour.

Following this, Amazon, which is one of the largest providers of facial software to law enforcement, decided to stop its police use of its software for a year. Many other liberal urban areas around the US, such as San Francisco and Boston,  have then started to ban the practice at the forefront of banning the practice.