Microsoft is ditching emotion reading
Microsoft has announced that it will stop developing and distributing controversial emotion-reading software as major tech companies move toward privacy and security, and the company also says it will severely restrict its facial recognition platform.
Microsoft's shift away from emotion recognition software is another sign that big companies are prioritizing privacy, and the company also acknowledges that there is little scientific evidence behind the technology.
“Experts inside and outside the company have highlighted the lack of scientific consensus on defining the emotions and growing privacy concerns about this type of capability, according to a digitartlend report,” Natasha Crampton, head of AI at Microsoft, wrote in a company blog post.
Facial emotion recognition software uses advanced artificial intelligence to determine a person's emotional state, comparing a person's facial expressions, the size of their pupils, the shape of their mouths, and other visual cues against a database of thousands of photographs of people with known different feelings. The AI then assigns an emotion to the subject.
Microsoft and other tech companies have been working on the technology for several years, along with facial recognition software, and the company is making a surprising switch to what they call "the Microsoft responsible AI standard."
Along with the end of emotion-recognition technology, Microsoft will join Google and others in restricting access to facial recognition software, and Microsoft will establish transparency guidelines and what it calls "firewalls" to ensure customers who use facial recognition do so ethically.
Google stopped selling facial recognition products in 2018, citing the need for more secure policies around the technology, and IBM stopped providing facial recognition technology to government agencies and police in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) shut down facial recognition software in 2021 and stopped identifying people in photos uploaded to Facebook.
Azure Face, an artificial intelligence system created by Microsoft to provide facial recognition capabilities, has been used primarily by private companies in healthcare and research, as some local government agencies use it to track people in public places, although Microsoft does not release exact details. About its customers, the data shows that there are at least 356 current Azure Face subscribers.
Microsoft facial recognition customers will get one year and then lose access to Azure Face.
