Not everyone is into Zoom’s emotion tracking skills
28 groups call the tech invasive, discriminatory, and fake
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Fight for the Future and 27 other human rights organizations have penned a letter askingZoomto stop developing emotion tracking software.
Emotion tracking software uses an AI to analyze a person’s face during a video call to track their emotional and facial responses. Thelettercalls this software “ …invasive technology… [and] a violation of privacy and human rights.”
Fight for the Futuretouches upon five main pointsas to why it and the other organizations are concerned. They claim that it’s a security risk, discriminatory, manipulative, based on pseudoscience, and an avenue for retaliation.
Privacy concerns
According toProtocol, one purpose of emotional tracking software is to provide data to a sales team on whether or not their pitch is working for their client. By knowing a client’s “emotional state”, a team can adjust their strategy on the fly. Another purpose is totrack students’ emotional state, see how engaged they are, and use that data to better online classes.
The groups worry bad actors and even government organizations can steal the data obtained from this technology to track people. From there, the tech could be used to discriminate against people of certain groups. Fight for the Future even compares it tofacial recognition, which has been criticized for being unreliable, unjust, and invasive.
They’re also concerned about companies monitoring users to manipulate them or outright punishing them for expressing “bad emotions.”
And on top of all that, this tech might not even work. A study by theAssociation for Psychological Sciencereveals that the face doesn’t always reflect a person’s emotions since people can easily hide them.
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The letter concludes with the groups asking Zoom to respond and state that it will no longer continue developing emotion tracking by May 20, 2022.
Analysis: Zoom’s response
Zoom has yet to respond to Fight for the Future, but the letter does point out instances of the company bowing to its users. Back in late 2020, Zoom rolled outend-to-end encryptionto paying users after receiving a ton of backlash for its poor security protocols. And during that same time period,Zoom removed attention trackingdue to similar privacy concerns.
While Zoom has changed its mind in the past, the current company may not budge. It recently launchedZoom IQ for Sales, an add-on for Meetings that provides a post-meeting emotional analysis and transcript of all the conversations.
For those interested,Fight for the Future has a petition pagewhere people can sign and support its efforts to get Zoom to remove emotion tracking from its platform.
Cesar Cadenas has been writing about the tech industry for several years now specializing in consumer electronics, entertainment devices, Windows, and the gaming industry. But he’s also passionate about smartphones, GPUs, and cybersecurity.
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