Amazon.com Inc. said it will implement a one-year moratorium on police department use of its facial recognition software, a major course change for a company that has been one of the most strident defenders of the controversial technology.

“We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge,” the company said Wednesday in a two-paragraph blog post. “We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.”

The move comes amid widespread protests over the killing in police custody of George Floyd, who was black. Facial recognition technology has been shown in experiments to sometimes have difficulty identifying people with darker skin.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing group, in 2016 released Rekognition, a software service designed to identify objects in still images or video, including the ability to match a face with images in a database without taking the time to manually compare images.

Rekognition wasn’t the only such software on the market. Amazon rivals such as Microsoft Corp. and Google sell similar capabilities. But Amazon’s software became the focus of an intense debate about the potential for powerful, new software to undermine human rights two years later after the American Civil Liberties Union called out the risks that such software would misidentify people. The ACLU sought to draw parallels between facial recognition tools and previous technologies that governments used to infringe on people’s rights.

Nina Lindsey, an Amazon spokeswoman, declined to comment beyond the blog post.

International Business Machines Corp. earlier this week said it would no longer sell general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software. Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said in a letter to Congress that the company opposed uses of technology, including facial recognition, for mass surveillance, racial profiling or violations of basic human rights.

Rekognition runs on Amazon servers and is delivered to customers as an internet service, making it, in theory, relatively simple for Amazon to suspend access for police users. It’s unclear how many law enforcement agencies were using Rekognition. In an interview for a PBS Frontline investigation that aired earlier this year, AWS chief Andy Jassy said he didn’t know the total number of police departments using Rekognition.