According to Microsoft's Brad Smith
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Today the privacy of our data is valued more than ever. The facts that we all know and that refer to the huge amounts of data put at risk (today we learned about the case of Instagram), make it a rising value: privacy. In fact, that's what Apple boasts about in the latest iPhone announcement.
That is why the news regarding Microsoft is striking, in which they affirm that the Redmond-based company refused to sell its facial recognition technologyfor use in California law enforcement.
In defense of human rights
In the company they had the possibility of signing a contract whereby the facial recognition technology they had developed, could be installed in vehicles and in cameras at service of law enforcement authorities in the US Pacific state.
From Reuters they echo the news, and it is striking that the agreement did not come to fruition due to the fear that Microsoft had, which was none other than the that this technology could be used and Human Rights could be violated.
In fact is the argument offered by Brad Smith, President of Microsoft. From the company it is argued that the objective of the authorities was to use the facial recognition system to carry out an examination, in the form of a facial scan (forgive the redundancy), to all the people who had been detained.
This way of proceeding could put minorities and women at risk They could be detained and interrogated more frequently in order to of having a larger, superior database that would serve to counteract the large presence of white males in the registry.
Smith has announced this at a conference at Stanford University, in which he happened to say that they also rejected a contract to install this technology in a city in a country, both unidentified. The reason in this case is that could jeopardize a basic freedom and an essential right such as that of assembly.
It acknowledged, however, that they agreed to provide the technology to a US prison, once they received guarantees that its scope of application would be limited and would only have the objective of improving security within the anonymous institution.
Smith, finally, defended that companies must have a commitment to the defense of Human Rights, an aspect increasingly placed at risk, since the rapid advancement of technology allows the authorities in general, control and surveillance leads to extremes never seen before.
Source | Reuters
