In a serious reversal, the Internal Revenue Service says it can transition away from utilizing ID.me’s controversial facial recognition identification verification software program following weeks of public controversy and criticism from privateness teams.

Starting this summer time, the IRS had deliberate to require customers trying to entry their IRS account on-line to submit facial recognition scans by ID.me’s third-party identification verification providers. The IRS and ID.me claimed this course of would have helped cut back fraud. ID.me in the meantime has come underneath renewed scrutiny after CEO Blake Hall admitted that, underneath some circumstances, the corporate does run person face scans towards a database of faces, a truth they hadn’t made clear beforehand.

In the weeks since, civil liberty groups, privacy experts, and lawmakers have all referred to as on the IRS to reevaluate its relationship with ID.me. The company listened.

“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig stated in a press release. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”

The reversal comes lower than one 12 months after ID.me was awarded an $86 million greenback contract from the Treasury Department. ID.me didn’t instantly reply to Gizmodo’s request for remark.

“We’re glad to see that grassroots activism and backlash from lawmakers and experts has forced the agency to back down,” Campaign Director at Fight for the Future Caitlin Seeley George stated in an e mail to Gizmodo. “No one should be coerced into handing over their sensitive biometric information to the government in order to access essential services.”

The IRS’ reversal got here simply hours after Oregon Senator and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden wrote a letter to the IRS commissioner urging the IRS to finish its use of facial recognition. In his letter, Wyden expressed issues over the know-how’s well-documented struggles to precisely establish girls and other people of shade and stated it was, “unacceptable to force Americans to submit to scans using facial recognition technology as a condition of interacting with the government online.”

That assertion piggybacked off one other letter despatched by Republican senators on the Finance Committee, who called on the IRS to finish its relationship with ID.me.

“There is ample evidence to be very concerned about an IRS contractor’s ability to safely manage, collect and store this unprecedented level of confidential, personal data.” the senators wrote. “The decision millions of Americans are forced to make is to pay the toll of giving up their most personal information, biometric data, to an outside contractor or return to the era of a paper-driven bureaucracy where information moves slow, is inaccurate, and some would say is processed in ways incompatible with contemporary life.”

Now, based on Fight for the Future’s Seeley George, the main target might flip to different federal companies and not less than 30 states at the moment partnered with ID.me. “The lawmakers who led the charge against the IRS use of this technology should immediately call for an end to other agencies’ contracts, and there should be a full investigation into the Federal government’s use of facial recognition and how it came to spend taxpayer dollars contracting with a company as shady as ID.me,” the activist stated.