Published on Jun 22, 2022
As part of their decision to stop selling technology that guesses emotions based on facial images, Microsoft Corp said Tuesday that they would stop selling such technology. Facial recognition technology would no longer be available unfettered.
Leading cloud providers are taking steps to rein in sensitive technologies on their own. US and European legislators are currently preparing comprehensive legal limits.
A Microsoft review of emotion recognition systems has been underway at least since last year.
Microsoft’s Azure AI unit’s principal group product manager Sarah Bird wrote in a blog post that these efforts raised significant privacy concerns, a lack of consensus about how to define emotions, and the inability to generalize facial expressions to emotional states across policies, demographics, and regions.
According to Reuters, Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud conducted a similar evaluation last year. Google blocked 13 planned emotions from its tool for reading emotion and reevaluated four existing ones, such as joy and sorrow. Frowning and smiling would be described without being attached to emotions in a new system.
An inquiry to Google on Tuesday was not immediately answered.
To use Microsoft’s facial recognition services, customers must now obtain approval. Face scans can be used to log into websites and open locked doors.
