They're hamstrung by their shareholders. This is why it's impossible to find a public company that cares about ethics in any context other than potential blowback.
Amazon can keep the sharks at bay for a year and cry for help, but if regulation is too late, they're going to be eaten for lunch by shareholders and they know this.
Despite what many people believe, shareholders don’t actually work like that. They care about making money, but no one is going to sell Amazon because they’re not continuing a single low profit line item. No shareholder is condemning Apple for not making Rekognition, and Amazon wouldn’t be killed for dropping it.
> Despite what many people believe, shareholders don’t actually work like that.
Shareholders do determine whether a company does something ethical or something profitable. And by the numbers, they choose profit unless it would cause public outcry (and sometimes despite that).
Last year, only 2% of Amazon stockholders voted to ban the sale of facial recognition software to the government, and only 28% even wanted a report on possible threats to civil liberties.
> They care about making money, but no one is going to sell Amazon because they’re not continuing a single low profit line item.
This is true, but I don't understand how it's relevant.
> No shareholder is condemning Apple for not making Rekognition
Nobody is condemning Apple because it would be more of a risk for them to develop it, since they would have to do a larger pivot from their current core product. Amazon in contrast is already in the business of selling cloud services, so it's a product with a straightforward path to profitability.
> and Amazon wouldn’t be killed for dropping it.
My point is that Amazon won't drop it in the long term. The 1-year moratorium is to cover their butt until they can figure out how to sell the technology to the police without becoming the scapegoat for the recently news-blasted civil liberties movements. If I were in their position I'd do the same.
If Jeff Bezos decided tomorrow that Amazon would never sell any face recognition software, that’d be that. The only recourse from shareholders would be to try to replace him as CEO, which isn’t going to happen over this issue. I agree that shareholders aren’t going to proactively choose to stop it, but they generally give companies a fairly large leeway for what decisions to make.
Amazon can keep the sharks at bay for a year and cry for help, but if regulation is too late, they're going to be eaten for lunch by shareholders and they know this.