It’s a crucial moment for facial recognition. Though most police departments have yet to deploy it, some uses by law enforcement have been troubling.

This year researchers found that Detroit had signed a $1 million deal with a vendor to continuously screen hundreds of public cameras throughout the city without citizen approval. In May, Clare Garvie, a facial recognition researcher at Georgetown Law, revealed sketchy tactics used by the New York Police Department to match security camera footage with potential suspects who looked like celebrities .

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The technical limitations and biases of facial recognition technology are not well understood even by the companies that market the systems, which makes oversight of its use in the real world particularly problematic . Critics, meanwhile, worry that widespread deployment of the technology risks laying the foundation of a comprehensive surveillance state (just look at China).

“There’s a race to the bottom right now with this technology, and the challenge is to stop that elevator before it goes through the ground floor,” Mr. Friedman said. It’s something Axon’s ethics board report fought to change. According to the ethics board report, in early conversations about facial recognition, Axon initially argued that it “could not dictate to customers how products were used, nor its customers’ policies, and that it could not feasibly patrol misuse of its product.” That’s Big Tech’s version of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” And it’s a view that’s very widely held across the industry.

Mr. Friedman hopes that Axon’s pledge will force other vendors to think about where the new technology might be headed and how it could impact the most vulnerable. “We want them to remember that just because you can build it, doesn’t mean you should.”

The ultimate goal of the ethics board goes a step further: forcing the company to see that the customer for Axon products is not law enforcement but “the community that those law enforcement and public safety organizations serve.”