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July 13, 2018 – 11:30 pm
By:
Editorial of El País and Agencia EFE
Harassed by denunciations that signal him as an "accomplice" of President Donald Trump's plan to separate thousands of families Latin migrants, Microsoft technology was forced yesterday to ask the US authorities to regulate the controversial facial recognition technology.
Microsoft is one of the world leaders in the development and commercialization of this type of technology, which empowers However, the president of the company, Bradford L. Smith, said yesterday in a message to Congress of this country that it is "more reasonable for elected governments to be at the polls".
Facial recognition technology, more and more accurate but still "far from perfect", as Smith admits, is used to identify people in photographs or videos without their consent .
See also: "Try my ride", the application of mass transit that seeks to improve mobility in Cali
While its advocates point out how useful it can be to identify criminals, associations in favor Civil rights warn that it can be used for mass surveillance, limiting the freedom of people to attend demonstrations without being registered.
Microsoft argues that its facial recognition technology is able to recognize the age, gender and even emotions of the people that it identifies.
But Microsoft provides its services to the Immigration and Customs Offices (ICE), protagonists in recent weeks of the new policy of separation. family at the borders, which has caused embarrassment among its employees.
Given that yesterday the company said that its technology is not used to separate the immigrant families.
And Smith went even further in a message on his blog in which he asked: "Should the law compel? to companies to obtain their consent before collecting images of people for facial recognition? "
Before the messages, the American Civil Liberties Union reacted immediately and said that Microsoft" is right when it warns that the use of facial recognition must be fully analyzed and debated by the government. "
But, at the same time, he complained to Amazon and Microsoft to stop providing these services to public institutions, which can use it to suppress.
In June, a minority group of Shareholders of Amazon demanded that its founder put an end to the controversial facial recognition program that develops, Rekognition, for having assumed a "threat to privacy" and showed its "deep concern" that it could be used to "disproportionately monitor minorities."
On the other hand Companies like Uber have used their services to identify their drivers and ensure that no one supplants their verified drivers.
However, the use of technology is surrounded by other controversies.The president of Microsoft admitted, for example, that facial recognition works better with whites than with other races, as& Showed earlier this year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
. 19659021] Facial recognition is software that automatically identifies a person in a digital image, comparing thousands of features of their face with a database.
The purpose of these systems is, given an image of an unknown face, find an image of the same face in a set of known images. The challenge of the companies that develop them is to reach the highest level of success, but in real time.
Recognition technology has become more common for unlocking phones and tagging friends on social networks, but for this reason Via is also a powerful government surveillance weapon.
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