Microsoft has said it will stop developing and distributing controversial emotion-reading software as major technology companies focus on privacy and security. The company also says it will severely limit its own face recognition platform.
The move away from Microsoft’s emotional recognition software is another sign of the growing priority of high-tech privacy. 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 the definition of emotions,” wrote Natasha Crampton, Microsoft’s AI CEO, in a post on the company’s blog. “… and heightened concerns about privacy around this type of opportunity.”
Facial emotion recognition software uses advanced AI to determine the emotional state of the subject. He compares the facial expressions of the subject, the size of their pupils, the shape of their mouths and other visual signs with a database of thousands of photos of people with different familiar emotions. AI then assigns emotion to the subject.
Microsoft and other technology companies have been working on the technology for several years, along with facial recognition software. The company is making a sudden change 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. Microsoft will establish guidelines for transparency and what it calls “barriers” to ensure that customers who use face recognition do so ethically.
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Google stopped selling face recognition products in 2018, citing the need for more secure technology policies. IBM stopped supplying government and police agencies with face recognition technology in 2020 after the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) closed its face recognition programming in 2021 and stopped identifying people in photos uploaded to Facebook.
Azure Face, an artificial intelligence system created by Microsoft to provide face recognition capabilities, is used primarily by private businesses in healthcare and research, with some local government agencies using it to track people in public. Although Microsoft has not released exact details about its customers, the data shows at least 356 current Azure Face subscribers.
Microsoft Face Recognition customers will be one year old and then lose access to Azure Face.
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