“In September 2020, IBM described such "one-to-many" matching systems as "the type of facial recognition technology most likely to be used for mass surveillance, racial profiling, or other violations of human rights."”
In June 2020 IBM’s CEO told Congress the company was done with general-purpose facial recognition. Three years later it took $69.8 million from the UK Home Office to build a one-to-many matcher for immigration and police. IBM’s defense is that the system can’t ingest video, so it doesn’t count as mass surveillance. The 2020 pledge was a press release timed to the protests, and the contract is the actual policy.