Wednesday 13 May 2015

Microsoft's accidental drive towards a dystopian police state?

Microsoft’s new face-analysis tool, which guesses (with varying degrees of success) how old you are based on a photo, was apparently an “experiment”, said Greg Kumparak on Techcrunch.com. There were hopes of “perhaps 50 users” trying it out. But, somewhat predictably, the “How Old Do I Look?” app went viral so quickly that “they had trouble keeping the servers up”. What exactly is the company up to? “I’m not saying that Microsoft is a front for a shadowy power that hopes to build a database of faces that will one day be used by a dystopian police state,” said Ellen E. Jones in The Independent on Sunday. But the app “couldn’t have been better designed for the purpose”.

Source: The Week

 

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