
Microsoft turned down facial-recognition sales on human rights concerns - dredmorbius
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai/microsoft-turned-down-facial-recognition-sales-on-human-rights-concerns-idUSKCN1RS2FV
======
ergothus
I've been harsh to Microsoft in the past (for what I consider good reasons)
but I want to give credit where credit is due - this is exactly the sort of
behavior that many have been asking for from companies. Foresee a problem,
don't do the thing.

It doesn't matter that there's an argument of this refusal being good business
- truth is, big companies being confident that consumer outrage won't
translate into enough market impact to say they shouldn't do the bad thing has
become the norm. Nice to see an instance where that's the not the case.

~~~
Y_Y
Now that they've gotten the credit for refusing, they'll probably wait a year
and do it anyway with some slick PR. You can link this comment then.

~~~
naikrovek
> Now that they've gotten the credit for refusing, they'll probably wait a
> year and do it anyway with some slick PR. You can link this comment then.

This attitude concerns me, a bit. You're mad at Microsoft (it appears) for
something they haven't done, and for using "slick PR" that doesn't exist.

What's the basis for the anger?

~~~
sneak
Battleships run Windows. Drone strike missions are planned in PowerPoint.

Microsoft isn’t exactly working from a blank slate of reputation here.

~~~
samfriedman
Effectively all military missions are planned in PowerPoint, and I don't think
Microsoft shaped that product with battlefield efficiency in mind.

~~~
ragona
> Effectively all military missions are planned in PowerPoint

Wait... really??

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Why are you surprised?

~~~
ragona
I just figured there would be some fancy battle tool!

------
anbop
Microsoft is actually lobbying pretty hard in Washington to ban private use of
facial recognition. The cynic will say that it’s because they realize that
Google and Facebook will outdo them here, but I couldn’t care less about their
motives.

~~~
StefanKarpinski
I think it’s not so much that Google and Facebook will outdo them in this
area, but about _why_ they are so much more vested in and therefore better at
technologies that are opposed to privacy. Google and Facebook as businesses
are all about collecting information about their users and monetizing it,
which is inherently anti-privacy. Apple and Microsoft actually sell something
(hardware and software, respectively), so the smart move for them is to
position themselves as firmly pro-privacy—because they _can_ whereas Google
and Facebook cannot (without finding new business models). We will
increasingly see Apple and Microsoft using privacy features as a competitive
advantage against Google and Facebook. We’ve already been seeing this with
Apple quite a lot recently, now Microsoft is following suit.

~~~
vturner
They have a long road to walk on privacy with Windows. Isn't 10 a privacy
minefield?

------
Isamu
This is short but interesting.

Microsoft is aware of the downsides of false positives. In this case
California police officers would use facial recognition on individuals, but
Microsoft recognized that the false positives could disproportionately target
women and minorities. That could result in massive backlash against the
company.

So they are calling for greater regulation of AI-related tech, considering the
human rights issues. No mention of what "regulation" could mean here.

~~~
SilasX
Wait, what? So if the false positives were evenly distributed across races,
then that's no big deal?

~~~
laughinghan
I'm confused by the premise of your question. Are under the impression that
it's possible for a law enforcement tool to have zero false positives?

Nothing has ever had nor will ever have zero chance of false positives. Even
DNA evidence can have false positives. Law enforcement, the justice system,
and society overall has always had and will always have (highly imperfect)
mechanisms to deal with nonzero false positive rates.

Therefore, it is of course important that the false positive rate not be
higher than average for a subgroup, as they will be disproportionately
affected, since our systems will be set up to deal with the lower average
false positive rate.

~~~
SilasX
No, that wasn't my point, and I agree that false positives are inevitable. My
point was that you shouldn't _only_ care about an excessive false positive
rate when it happens to minority group.

------
Razengan
A future of global surveillance seems inevitable at this rate, but society
will evolve means to thwart it.

Wearing masks in public is already a norm in some East-Asian countries, and
it’s a form of fashion as well [0]. Just add glasses to that, which will
become common if AR smartglssses take off.

Maybe we’ll see people walking around in fashionable neo-tribal’ish masks [1]
(as decorations around AR glasses) to hinder intrusive face/retina scanning.

[0]
[https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=face+mask+fashion](https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=face+mask+fashion)

[1]
[https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=killmonger+mask](https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=killmonger+mask)

~~~
snaky
> China has begun rolling out new surveillance software capable of recognising
> people simply by the way that they walk.

> The "gait recognition" technology, developed by Chinese artificial
> intelligence firm Watrix, is capable of identifying individuals from the
> shape and movement of their silhouette from up to 50 metres away, even if
> their face is hidden.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-
surveill...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-surveillance-
facial-recognition-body-walk-technology-watrix-privacy-cctv-a8622156.html)

~~~
kkarakk
you can fool gait recognition simply by putting a stone in your shoe,gait
recognition is no where as sophisticated as it claims to be.

~~~
Razengan
and won’t silhouettes be easily affected by different clothing?

------
chris_mc
My big question with face rec is this: what happens when the tech is so good
that people can find out the identity of someone whose "special" photos were
stolen or shared on the internet? That's going to be a huge deal and will
cause huge problems for some people if not handled correctly.

~~~
matt4077
I think society has actually gotten better at this. A strategically leaked sex
tape is already an acceptable career move for celebrities, and I don’t think
many people would necessary care about it in politics, either.

~~~
tracker1
I think it's often more about hypocrisy than it is about the act/actions. It
seems to, at least from my pov, work out worst for conservative/republican
politicians than left leaning ones. Of course when you get bad actors on the
left, this also means things are overlooked or forgiven that really shouldn't
be.

~~~
matt4077
Sex tape is to whatever you’re talking about as spending money is to bank
robbery.

------
JohnFen
I'm not able to say this as much as I wish I could, but good on Microsoft!

------
m0zg
What's the point of turning it down? I can train a superhuman-performance
facial recognition model with consumer hardware sitting in my garage. The cat
has been out of the bag for close to a decade. What leads to abuse in this
case is not the technology, but the policy, and withholding technology
accomplishes nothing policy-wise simply because it's accessible to just about
anyone with a GPU.

~~~
laughinghan
But making news for withholding that technology, thereby drawing attention to
and sparking discussion about the issue, _can_ affect public sentiment, which
in turn affects policy.

There's also supply and demand. Reducing supply of the technology increases
its costs.

Plus, it's good PR for them.

~~~
m0zg
The past 20 years (along with PATRIOT act and FISA courts) show that we can
"discuss" until we're blue in the face and nothing is going to change. This
also seems to be remarkably bipartisan, for a change. The only set of actors
that can change anything in US congress are corporate donors and PACs, and
Microsoft is a donor (through its employees and PACs, don't know about
directly).

Reducing the supply of this particular technology is not going to increase its
costs, because literally anyone with a recent GPU and some motivation can just
download it from GitHub at this point. The most worrisome user of it, the US
government and its various three-letter agencies, already have and extensively
use this tech. Casinos have been using it for well over a decade to spot
people who are "too consistently lucky".

I do buy your point regarding good PR. It's just completely ineffectual wrt
its stated goals.

------
_cs2017_
Microsoft said they refused to provide the tech due to the bias against
minorities caused by the training data.

How difficult is it to fix this bias? For example, the model can be told to
only produce a match when a confidence level is higher than a certain
threshold. Then the threshold can be increased as needed on those subsets of
faces where training data is lacking. Would that work?

Also, why not build more diverse training data if this is a pervasive problem?
It is not free, but neither is it cost prohibitive for someone like Microsoft.

------
Vinnl
I think the best part of this is that they're talking publicly about this, and
are explaining our reasoning. We shouldn't be dependent on Microsoft making
the ethical judgment correctly every time. Instead, (potential) customers
themselves should learn about the potential downsides, lest they simply go to
a competitor to purchase the same flawed technology anyway.

------
Rebelgecko
That's nice, although I wonder how effective it is to try and prevent
governments from getting their hands on technology that is made available to
corporations. What's to stop some consulting company from signing up for an
Azure account and selling the same service to the "non-Free" country in the
article?

------
ei8htyfi5e
Are there just PR departments behind the scenes leaking things like this
following the other bad press received by other tech firms? Anybody have
experience with this world? How far out can you predict media coverage I
wonder.

------
MattSayar
My first impression: This is a good thing overall. But then I think, well some
other bidder will do it. And what if they do a worse job? Does that lead to
detaining the wrong person? Is that better?

------
grumpy-cowboy
Microsoft turned down facial-recognition sales on PR concerns.

------
xrd
This seems positive.

Yet, this article sounded like a PR piece from MS. Is it just me?

Has Reuters had issues in the past accepting work from journalists who are
paid flaks?

Is my Spidey sense off here?

~~~
xrd
The journalist Joseph Menn looks like he has stellar integrity as a long time
writer (despite hiding Beto's involvement with Dead Cow cult) so it must just
be me.

~~~
laughinghan
> despite hiding Beto's involvement with Dead Cow cult

Huh? Isn't Menn's Reuters article the one that broke that news?

I'd also question how much the public interest would be damaged if that
information hadn't come to light.

~~~
xrd
No, I'm saying there was controversy about the fact (?) that he didn't
disclose this information even though he knew about it for two years. Isn't
that the story? I think there are good reasons he might have felt this was not
doing justice to the story, the public overreacts when they hear about a
hacking group. I'm not questioning whether it should have come to light or
not.

------
basetop
What about their OS, Office Suite, DBs, etc? Do they turn down sales of those
on human rights concerns too? Will Microsoft stop taking "telemetry" data with
its software?

Would they reject any sales to saudi arabia, china, israel or even the US
military if human rights concerns arise?

If this is part of a genuine ethical paradigm shift within the company, then I
commend them for it. But if this is just a one-time PR move, then my opinion
of Microsoft has dropped considerably.

------
balozi
The facial-recognition tech race has already been lost to the Chinese anyway.

~~~
rhizome
They have one that achieves high accuracy without requiring human QC? I'm
skeptical.

------
alfl23
Couldn't implement the tech, decides to have marketing spin off instead.

~~~
fizwhiz
Citation needed?

