Imagine the government knew where you stopped for coffee this morning. Or which colleague you had lunch with yesterday. Or where you go to worship over the weekend.
This is the reality for Palestinians living under military occupation thanks to the facial recognition software funded by Microsoft.
Microsoft has financially backed AnyVision, the surveillance company responsible for tracking Palestinian faces 24/7, that also plans to expand in Macau, China and Russia. This has to stop.
Tell Microsoft to drop its investment in AnyVision and any company developing Orwellian facial recognition technology.
This is not the face Microsoft wants to show the world. As you read this, its own CEO is on a speaking tour assuring the public that Microsoft is a tech company you can trust.
By financing this surveillance tool Microsoft is contradicting its own ethics code that promises not to deploy facial recognition where the human rights risks are too big.
So, pressure from you to call on it to stop funding this Orwellian technology would expose its true colors.
Microsoft: drop your investments in facial recognition technology now.
Facial recognition technology is not just dangerous for regimes in Israel, Russia and China, it should be banned world-wide.
Luckily we can do something to stop this technology -- time and time again we've shown that, when SumOfUs members like you act against big tech, we can make a difference. When around 86,000 SumOfUs members around the world demanded that Google drop its controversial Dragonfly Project, a censored search engine tool for China, Google listened! The CEO Sundar Pichai made a clear public statement that there are “no plans” to relaunch in China and that “we [Google] are not spending time on it.”
And this time, we are joining forces with partners like Jewish Voice for Peace who we worked with on a multi-year-long campaign to push Airbnb in its operations in West Bank.
Now you can do the same with Microsoft and force it to pull its funding from the facial recognition technology used to surveil and repress Palestinians on a daily basis.
More information
The Guardian. 26 July 2019.
Forbes. 1 August 2019.
