Microsoft Urges Congress to Regulate Use of Facial Recognition

Civil liberties and privacy advocates said they both welcomed and felt wary of Microsoft's push for government regulation, questioning how committed the company was to strong user privacy controls. In May, for instance, Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive, said at a company developer conference that privacy was a "human right." Yet in June, Microsoft donated $195,000 to an effort to defeat a consumer privacy bill in California. "People have a right to go about their lives without having their faces scanned in secret -- by companies or the government," said Alvaro Bedoya, director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, who has studied facial recognition. "Will Microsoft agree that companies should never scan your face without your permission? Will it agree that government face scans should be tightly controlled and in some cases banned?"