Microsoft’s top leadership continue to call for regulation of the facial recognition industry, this time with CEO Satya Nadella making the case in a talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “In the marketplace there’s no discrimination between the right use and the wrong use,” he said, regarding practices concerning the development and sale…
“By targeting three of the world’s biggest tech companies, the letters could help to focus attention on the issue.” A coalition of 85 advocacy and activist groups have signed open letters urging Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to pledge not to sell facial recognition technology to government authorities. Signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union, the…
“GoTrust ID is designed to authenticate a user based on device identification with respect to Android and iOS smartphones, together with facial, fingerprint, and or iris recognition, depending on a given device’s capabilities. “ Acer is bringing passwordless authentication to more consumers, care of GoTrust. The companies have announced that the latter’s GoTrust ID authentication…
An AI research group based in New York University has issued a new paper calling for government regulation of artificial intelligence technologies. Called AI Now, the group is headed by employees from major tech companies including Google and Microsoft. Its latest publication, simply titled “AI Now Report 2018”, highlights the growing use of AI technologies…
A new Windows 10 update has delivered FIDO2 authentication, with Microsoft placing its Windows Hello biometric authentication platform closer to front and center for end users. With respect to the latter, Windows’ development team has now placed a Windows Hello setup button right on the OS’s lock screen. It’s clearly a move aimed at encouraging…
At a time of heightened controversy around government use of facial recognition technology, Trueface is laying out its own ethical guidelines for ‘responsibly deployed facial recognition’. Writing in a Medium post, Trueface CEO Shaun Moore groups his firm’s ethos under three main headings. The first, and perhaps most important, is “Humanity First”, a reference to…
“[ID R&D’s] participation in the program will allow it to launch a cloud service through which other developers will be able to take advantage of its solutions.” ID R&D has been accepted into Microsoft’s IoT & AI Insider Labs program, the company has announced. IoT & AI Insider Labs is essentially aimed at accelerating the development…
Microsoft President Brad Smith is once again calling for government regulation of facial recognition technology. Smith made the case at this week’s Web Summit conference in Lisbon, sharing the stage with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. He noted that facial recognition could soon be used to let retailers identify consumers and their purchase history…
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FIDO Alliance Executive Director Brett McDowell took the stage with digital financial services expert David Birch on Money20/20’s opening day, and took the opportunity to make the case for the implementation of FIDO standards in financial services (and everywhere else). Speaking to Birch as part of the “Identity Around the World: Global Case Studies in…
It looks like Google is preparing to bring a Face Unlock system to future devices running on its Chrome OS. The revelation comes by way of some newly added code in Chrome’s back-end. While the clues offered in code snippets can sometimes be a bit ambiguous, this sample seems pretty clear, with its key line…
The Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Facebook, and Microsoft together made unlikely partners in a recent joint briefing to the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors. The briefing revolved around the efforts taken by these organizations to prevent the kind of meddling seen…
Microsoft has officially announced that FIDO2-based web authentication has come to its Edge browser. First announced this April, the FIDO Alliance’s latest authentication standard features a core component called WebAuthn API. It’s designed to empower users of web browsers with convenient and highly secure authentication options, including facial recognition, a fingerprint scan on a paired…
As controversy over the public use of facial recognition continues, Microsoft is following Google’s lead in laying out its approach to the ethics of the technology in a new blog post by the company’s President, Brad Smith. It’s a far less concise and straightforward accounting than the one laid out by Google CEO Sundar Prichai,…
Microsoft’s face scanning technology is now better able to determine the genders of subjects with darker skin tones, the company has announced. In a post on its AI Blog, Microsoft explained that it had reduced its system’s error rates by “up to 20 times,” and specified that for women the error rates had been reduced…
Microsoft is taking advantage of the new FIDO2 authentication standard to eliminate usernames and passwords and replace them with compliant security key devices. The functionality comes by way of Azure Active Directory (or ‘Azure AD’), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity management service for the enterprise. An impending Windows 10 update will allow users who link their security…
“…while a growing number of computer devices feature the fingerprint sensors or infrared cameras needed to support Windows Hello biometric authentication, Fujitsu is proposing its own alternative – palm vein scanning…” Just a couple of months after teaming up with Microsoft on AI-powered solutions for businesses, Fujitsu is already making its pitch to the latter’s…
HP has announced a new POS terminal that supports biometric security via Windows Hello. It’s called the ElitePOS. It’s a fast POS terminal, with its Windows 10 operating system and 7th generation Intel Core processors. It’s also sleek, sporting an unobtrusive but clear touch display that should help to facilitate convenient transactions. For certain merchants,…
Microsoft has officially launched its biometric keyboard, along with a companion mouse device. The company’s Modern Keyboard was first unveiled in June, and is the first such device in the world to feature a fingerprint sensor embedded in one of its keys. That sensor comes by way of Fingerprint Cards, a Swedish company that has…
A new app that describes what an iPhone’s camera can see could prove useful to blind and visually impaired users. Called Seeing AI, the app uses computer vision to provide descriptive aid to users. It can read documents and scan barcodes, beeping at an increasing rate to let users know when their camera is getting…