Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/16/microsoft-hires-former-ag-eric.html
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Microsoft stipulated that AnyVision should comply with its six ethical principles to guide its facial recognition work: fairness, transparency, accountability, nondiscrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance.
I got nothing, absolutely nothing…
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Let me help you conform to the BBC style guide.
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Kinda glad he didn’t run for President now.
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Could have told you that ages ago.
He was totally on board with the Aaron Swartz prosecution.
“in March 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder defended Ortiz’s aggressive prosecution before the Senate Judiciary Committee, terming it, “a good use of prosecutorial discretion.””
Prosecutors are mostly complete fucking assholes, and giving them the power to make laws, much less making them president, is a terrible idea.
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"“Eric Holder will lend his name and credibility to this obvious abuse of human rights.”
Credibility? Good one.
Prosecutors are the worst kind of public official.
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No, prosecutors are a very powerful kind of official, but since liberals are too pure or something to ever fight for the role, it usually goes to Republicans (officially, or as in Holder’s case, functionally).
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Hey guys, relax. I’m sure that Holder, Microsoft’s hired auditor, will be more than free to issue strong findings against Microsoft, his employer, that have the possibility of costing them money or causing embarrassment. Microsoft, of all companies, would never issue self-serving reports or studies.
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I’m guessing that ethical principal six is a bit of a double agent. Being against illegal surveillance is certainly a plus; but there is also a lot of room for it to justify any surveillance that has not been deemed illegal, regardless of the local process for making things legal or getting things ruled illegal.
It’s honestly a bit of an odd man out on the list; in that all the others exist in reference to ethical standards(the most legalistic of the first five is ‘notice and consent’; but even there the standards for what constitute notice and what is considered meaningful consent are mostly ethical questions); while it is a pure legalism without the slightest reference to any particular principal.
It also seems to be the only one that would make facial recognition tech deployable just about anywhere. An Israeli military contractor selling software to keep the Palestinians in line is a particularly blatant instance of surveillance that’s likely to be technically lawful but not much else; but there really aren’t a lot of facial recognition datasets and applications where you can tick all six of the boxes, often quite a few less; even if you consider the clickwrap-EULA “you can opt out by just not going anywhere we’ve put cameras” level of ‘consent’ to be adequate.
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Very bad optics.
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