Microsoft Refuses To Sell Its Facial Recognition Tech To Police

In a recent announcement from Microsoft, it said that it has turned down California law enforcement force's request to deploy its facial recognition tech in police cars and body cameras.

While giving a speech at a Stanford University's event, Brad Smith - the president of Microsoft has expressed the company's concern over the exploitation of its facial recognition technology. They worry that this technology would disproportionately affect minorities and women. Previous research shows that due to the focus training on white and male faces, the facial recognition technology usually has a higher error margin when it comes to minorities and women.

Brad Smith has referred to a law enforcement agency, saying:

In recent years, for tech firms around the world, facial recognition technology has become an arguable topic, maybe partially because of the biases or its potential for authoritarian surveillance.

The public has been criticizing Amazon heavily because of letting its technology into the hand of law enforcement. It also faced many pushbacks from its shareholders and employees. Meanwhile, the search giant - Google says that it won't sell its technology to any buyers to prevent potential abuse.

In this hot debate, Microsoft has been a quite active voice, they have been calling out for regulation. Despite that ‘Move fast and break things’ has been the mantra for the whole industry in this decade, in a letter of Smith, he has written:

This week at Stanford, Brad Smith confirmed that the company has rejected a deal to set-up cameras with its facial recognition technology in an unnamed country's capital city. He said that it would go against their motto of protecting freedom of assembly.

However, while Microsoft is debating the merits of the technology, in the past, it offered it to an American, reasoning that: