Microsoft Halts Selling Emotion-Reading Technology

TECHNOLOGY

On Tuesday, 22nd June 2022, Microsoft Corp. said that, it is going to stop selling the technology that guesses someone’s emotion based on a facial image and will no longer be providing the access to the facial recognition technology.

The actions of the company has been reflecting the efforts by the leading cloud service providers to rein in the sensitive technologies on their own as the lawmakers in the United States and Europe are continuing to weigh the comprehensive legal limits.

Since 2021, Microsoft has been reviewing that, whether the emotion or facial recognition systems have been rooted in science. Sarah Bird, principal group product manager at Azure AI unit of Microsoft said, these efforts have raised important questions about the privacy and lack of consensus on a definition of emotions and the inability for generalizing the linkage between the emotional state and facial expression across the use cases, demographics and regions.

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The existing customers are going to have one year before losing their access to the artificial intelligence tools that has been claiming to infer the age, gender, emotion, age, smile, hair and makeup and facial hair.

Microsoft also said that, now the customers must obtain the approval for using the company’s facial recognition services, which can possibly enable the people for logging into the websites and also opening the locked doors through a face scanner.