We also need to remember Artificial Intelligence is in its infancy, the current advances are all using historic data to make pseudo decisions, none are actually properly learning, understanding and reasoning (the way humans do) and making informed, explainable and transparent decisions.
The first point to acknowledge is there is a difference between person recognition (not identifying or recognising a specific individual) using facial or other methods (is it a human or a car or other object / animal) and individual recognition (which is using facial recognition to identify and differentiate between individuals).
Many applications of FRT are for human safety for example, they dont need to know specifically who is in a scene, only to know a human is in a location that, at a given moment in time, is dangerous for any human to be there, and so an alert is raised.
While I understand the reaction of IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to distance themselves from this controversial topic, this will only serve to push the development of this type of technology more “underground”, being developed by companies with limited resources and capability that would in all probability do a worse job that the big tech players (who simply can not afford to get this type of tech wrong).
