President Brad Smith wrote an internal blog post, highlighting the positive and negative impacts of the technology and how the government must help regulate it
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The president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, Brad Smith, insisted that facial recognition technology should be regulated by the government with laws governing its acceptable uses in place.
Considering societal implications and potential abuse, Smith called for an 'expert commission' to look into regulating the technology in the US, stating that it needs a thoughtful approach. Microsoft is the first company to raise serious alarms about the technology.
In a company blog post, Smith highlights some uses of the technology, like finding a missing child or identifying a terrorist, as positives. However, Smith insists on government intervention when considering the negative impacts of this technology, like targeting people with a different colour, race, disability etc.
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He cited few examples of cases where facial recognition technology could be misused – government tracking people's activities without their knowledge or retailers using the technology to share information about customers' tastes and preferences with other retailers or a political rally already having a database of the people attending it.
Smith's blog post suggested that a thoughtful approach will allow public authorities to rely on a few standard procedures for deciding whom to track, investigate or even arrest for a crime. He also shared that the company’s contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not involve face recognition.
Earlier, US civil liberties groups called on Amazon to stop offering facial recognition services to government agencies, warning that the software could be used to unfairly target immigrants and people of colour.