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• Microsoft will stop offering facial recognition AI tool that predicts a person’s gender, age and emotional state
Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) on Tuesday said it would stop selling technology that analyzes and recognizes someone’s emotion based on pictures of faces.
The Face API will also no longer provide its corporate customers unfettered access to facial recognition technology.
Microsoft’s move reflects efforts by cloud service-providing companies to rein in sensitive technologies on their own as lawmakers in the US and Europe have started to weigh comprehensive legal limits after activists and academics have raised concerns that facial analysis software can be biased unreliable or invasive.
Since last year, the Redmond-software giant has been reviewing whether emotion recognition systems are rooted in science.
“These efforts raised important questions about privacy, the lack of consensus on a definition of ‘emotions,’ and the inability to generalize the linkage between facial expression and emotional state across use cases, regions, and demographics,” Sarah Bird, principal group product manager at Microsoft’s Azure AI unit, said in a blog post.
Existing customers like Uber, which verifies drivers with facial recognition, will have one year before losing access to artificial intelligence tools that purport to infer emotion, gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup.
Last year, Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Cloud blocked 13 planned emotions from its tool for reading emotions and placed four existing ones under reviews, such as joy and sorrow.
Microsoft also said customers now must obtain approval to use its facial recognition services and called on clients to avoid situations that infringe on privacy or in which the technology might struggle.
Picture Credit: Firstpost
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