Microsoft president calls for regulation

To be sure, Microsoft points out, facial recognition technology that can identify people through imagery of their faces has some extremely positive applications.

“Imagine finding a young missing child by recognizing her as she is being walked down the street,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a blog post last week.

Not as pleasant to imagine are the multitude of highly intrusive uses of the technology that’s in use by Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and many other tech firms, along with government agencies.

“Imagine a government tracking everywhere you walked over the past month without your permission or knowledge,” Smith said.

“Imagine a database of everyone who attended a political rally that constitutes the very essence of free speech.

“Imagine the stores of a shopping mall using facial recognition to share information with each other about each shelf that you browse and product you buy, without asking you first.”

Those sorts of intrusions into privacy and democracy have been sci-fi fodder for years, Smith pointed out, but “now it’s on the verge of becoming possible.”

If governments are going to use facial recognition technology, government needs to regulate it, Smith said. And if the technology is going to be deployed more widely across society, government must regulate those uses, he said.

Tech companies would do an “inadequate” job if it were up to them to decide how the technology will be applied, he said.

“Even if one or several tech companies alter their practices, problems will remain if others do not,” Smith wrote.

Congress should take the lead on regulating facial recognition technology, he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union, noting that Amazon has been selling facial recognition technology to police departments, agreed with Smith’s call for Congressional action, and pushed further.

“Congress should take immediate action to put the brakes on this technology with a moratorium on its use, given that it has not been fully debated and its use has never been explicitly authorized,” said ACLU lawyer Neema Singh Guliani.

Microsoft’s Smith also noted that facial recognition technology can be biased by its inputs during development, making some groups of people more likely to be misidentified.