Zoom's new emotion tracking tech in controversy

By Vipin Vijayan | First Published May 12, 2022, 11:50 AM IST

At least 28 human rights organizations termed Zoom's technology as manipulative and discriminatory.

Video communication platform Zoom's plans to develop software that will track the emotions of users to assess their engagement and sentiment has received flak from at least 28 human rights organizations who termed the technology as manipulative and discriminatory.

Calling Zoom's plans to develop emotion tracking technology potentially dangerous, the human rights groups said the software will be based on assumptions that all users have the same facial expressions, voice patterns, and body language.

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According to Zoom, the 'Q for Sales' software will assess users' talk-time ratio, frequent speaker changes and response time lag to examine how engaged a person is. The protests from rights groups stem from an article that appeared in April in which delved into firms wanting to use artificial intelligence to communicate better during virtual sales meetings.

Zoom's software gives credence to the pseudoscience of emotion analysis and is linked to inherently discriminatory and racist practices such as physiognomy, the groups said in their open letter to Zoom’s Founder & Chief Executive Officer Eric S Yuan.

In a statement, Chip Pitts, chairman of the Advocacy for Principled Action in Government, said: 'Large and influential Big Tech companies like Zoom now wield enormous global power (exceeding that of many national governments), and with that power comes the responsibility to respect and not violate privacy, equality, and other human rights."

He further said, "Widespread deployment of AI by Zoom for routine emotion recognition would represent unrealistic cyberutopian inattention to the risks posed -- especially to already marginalized individuals and groups -- and would be not only factually inaccurate, misleading, and deceptive, but also discriminatory, intrusive, and downright creepy.'

Stating that emotion recognition software had time and again shown to be unscientific, Daniel Leufer, Senior Policy Analyst at Access Now said, 'Our emotional states and our innermost thoughts should be free from surveillance. Emotion recognition software is simplistic rubbish that discriminates against marginalized groups, but even if it did work, and could accurately identify our emotions. It is not something that has any place in our society, and certainly not in our work meetings, our online lessons, and other human interactions that companies like Zoom provide a platform for.'

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