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The head of Microsoft rejected calls to stop selling facial recognition technologies to governments, saying it would be "cruel" to deprive state agencies of the ability to monitor every single movement of the public, despite his own fears.
In January, more than 85 human rights groups wrote to Microsoft, Amazon and Google urging them to stop selling facial recognition software to government agencies, fearing state surveillance and potential threats to activists, immigrants and others.
However, Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, told Business Insider – seemingly without irony – that such a measure would in and of itself "Cruel in its humanitarian effect."
"I do not understand the argument that companies should avoid any license to a government agency, for whatever reason." he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.
"A general ban on any use by the government is clearly going too far," the president of the software giant added.
While Smith went on to cite the example of facial recognition used in research to diagnose DiGeorge's rare syndrome, he also mentioned that it was used to search for missing children in India. Unfortunately for Smith, this last statement is actually contradicted by the Delhi High Court, which criticized the system last week because it had "Not worn any results" or "Helped solve any case of missing children."
Privacy advocates and civil liberties groups are concerned that facial recognition software may be used to monitor or track people, and fear that they may not mistakenly identify someone as a suspect, not to mention it has been shown to be racially biased.
Activists urge tech companies not to sell software to governments "Break then repair" method usually favored by tech giants simply does not work.
"We are at a crossroads with face monitoring and the choices made by these companies will now determine whether the next generation will have to fear being followed by the government for attending an event, traveling to their venue of worship or simply live their lives. , " Nicole Ozer of the ACLU has warned.
Remarkably, given his recent comments, Smith has expressed his own concerns about facial recognition software in the past, with respect to discrimination, privacy, and human rights. Perhaps his position at Microsoft leaves him with a shady area, given that the company has been found guilty of violating privacy and guilty of surveillance.
Windows 10 has been criticized for returning data to Microsoft and for lack of user unsubscription options, and Microsoft has recently been exposed "Large scale and secret" the collection of data from the users of his office and the storage of their information in the United States constitute a breach of the confidentiality guarantees of the European GDPR. In 2014, he was targeted by the fire while it was read that he was reading Hotmail's emails to determine the source of the Windows 8 code that had been leaked.
READ MORE: Ready for Big Brother? Americans increasingly accept unrestricted facial recognition technology
While technology companies sell facial recognition software to governments for seemingly lofty reasons, technology, like the companies themselves, can evolve into something else than expected in the future. ;origin.
Smith himself said it best in a December blog post: "The genius of facial recognition, so to speak, emerges from the bottle. If we do not act, we may wake up in five years to find that facial recognition services have expanded to exacerbate societal problems. At that time, it will be much more difficult to meet these challenges. "
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