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Microsoft announced Thursday that it will not sell its facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until a federal law exists that regulates its use. "We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology," Microsoft President Brad Smith said. Smith said Microsoft has not sold its facial-recognition technology to police departments. And the company has backed legislation in California that would allow police use of the technology with some restrictions.The company plans to put in place “review...

Deputies in this corner of western Oregon outside ultraliberal Portland used to track down criminals the old-fashioned way, faxing caught-on-camera images of a suspect around the office in hope that someone might recognize the face. Then, in late 2017, the Washington County Sheriff's Office became the first law enforcement agency in the country known to use Amazon's artificial-intelligence tool Rekognition, transforming this thicket of forests and suburbs into a public testing ground for a new wave of experimental police surveillance techniques. Almost overnight, deputies saw their investigative powers supercharged, allowing them to scan for matches of a suspect's face across...

Named Speech2Face, the neural network — a computer that "thinks" in a manner similar to the human brain — was trained by scientists on millions of educational videos from the internet that showed over 100,000 different people talking. From this dataset, Speech2Face learned associations between vocal cues and certain physical features in a human face, researchers wrote in a new study. The AI then used an audio clip to model a photorealistic face matching the voice Thankfully, AI doesn't (yet) know exactly what a specific individual looks like based on their voice alone. The neural network recognized certain markers in...

It's not as absurd as it sounds, says Robyn Metcalfe, a food historian who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. A GPS tracker strapped to the leg of a chicken, says Metcalfe, means "that people who potentially will buy that chicken will know every step that that chicken has taken." ZhongAn Online, a Chinese insurance company, has already outfitted more than a 100,000 chickens with trackers. The sensors upload information, such as how much exercise each chicken gets and what it ate. They are also working on facial-recognition technology so that consumers can one day make sure the...

Florida's busiest airport is becoming the first in the nation to require a face scan of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights, including U.S. citizens, according to officials there. The expected announcement Thursday at Orlando International Airport alarms some privacy advocates who say there are no formal rules in place for handling data gleaned from the scans, nor formal guidelines on what should happen if a passenger is wrongly prevented from boarding. Airports in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Washington already use face scans for some departing international flights,

From August, a train station in Berlin will be the testing ground for surveillance cameras with biometric face recognition capability. Here is an overview of the most important information and a look at the controversy. The test phase will take place at Berlin’s Südkreuz train station. It will include only selected participants and be conducted by the German federal police, Federal Criminal Police Office and the Interior Ministry in conjunction with Deutsche Bahn, the station operator. […] For the test phase, three specialized cameras have been installed that will film a particular entrance and an escalator leading to the station...

TRENTON, N.J., - New Jersey officials said the ban on smiling for driver's licenses is due to facial recognition software designed to prevent fraud. Mike Horan, spokesman for the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, said people posing for driver's license pictures are asked to refrain from smiling or making other facial expressions so as not to confuse the facial recognition software, the Philadelphia Daily News reported Thursday. The spokesman said the software, which was adopted in January, is designed to prevent anyone who already has a license from getting a second document under a different name. "That could be someone...

Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars. (snip) New Scientist reports that a 2010 study found technology used by NGI to be accurate in picking out suspects from a pool of 1.6 million mug shots 92 percent of the time. The system was tested on a trial basis in the state of Michigan earlier this year, and has already been cleared for pilot runs in Washington, Florida and North...

Zuck's smiley-face KGB getting even spookier In an undisclosed purchase thought to be in the neighborhood of $90M, the Big Blue Beast devoured tech startup Face.com, and it's sure to raise even further privacy concerns for users of snoopy ole Facebook (along with pretty much everybody else): a face recognition firm that's developed the ability to identify and tag faces in pictures... including any found on the internet. Add to that the fact that 'gigapixel' digital photos upwards of one billion pixels already allow individuals to be picked out of massive crowd shots in minute detail and soon the they can...

By using state of the art technology, Facebook is able to suggest which friends might be in photos that users upload. But the feature has raised concerns among privacy advocates, who worry the site is saving sensitive biometric data. Although users can opt out of the service, this only prevents Facebook from identifying them in photos automatically - it does not stop the service from gathering data from photos. Johannes Caspar, Hamburg’s data protection official, on Tuesday said the feature was a serious violation of people’s rights to determine what is done with their personal data. He added that German...

Last January, on a warm afternoon in Tampa, 72,000 people walked into Raymond James Stadium and joined one of the largest, most high-tech police lineups ever.As they passed through turnstiles leading into the stadium, closed-circuit cameras linked to computers scanned their features using face recognition software. In a fraction of a second, the software looked for matches in a database of thousands of criminals' faces.Few people knew they were taking part in the police check. Most probably wouldn't have cared, since they were probably too preoccupied with taking their seats as lucky ticket holders attending Super Bowl XXXV.In all, 19...

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) -- Face-scanning technology designed to recognize registered sex offenders and missing children has been installed in a Phoenix school in a pilot project that some law enforcement and education officials hope to expand. Two cameras, which are expected to be operational next week, will scan faces of people who enter the office at Royal Palm Middle School. They are linked to state and national databases of sex offenders, missing children and alleged abductors. An officer will be dispatched to the school in the event of a possible match, said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. "If it works...

<p>Camera technology designed to spot potential terrorists by their facial characteristics at airports failed its first major test, a report from the airport that tested the technology shows.</p> <p>Last year, two separate face-recognition systems at Boston's Logan Airport failed 96 times to detect volunteers who played potential terrorists as they passed security checkpoints during a three-month test period, the airport's analysis says. The systems correctly detected them 153 times.</p>

Tampa Eliminates Face-Recognition System Tampa Police Eliminate Controversial Facial-Recognition System, Citing Two-Year Failure The Associated Press TAMPA, Fla. Aug. 20 — Tampa police have scrapped their controversial security camera system that scanned city streets for criminals, citing its failure over two years to recognize anyone wanted by authorities. The system was intended to recognize the facial characteristics of felons, sexual predators and runaway children by matching passers-by in Ybor City with a database of 30,000 mug shots. "It's just proven not to have any benefit to us," Capt. Bob Guidara, a department spokesman, said Tuesday. The cameras have led only...

CIA-Funded Software To Scour For Clues WASHINGTON - The CIA is bankrolling efforts to improve technology designed to scour millions of digital photos or video clips for particular cars or street signs or even, some day, human faces. The innovative software from fledgling PiXlogic LLC of Los Altos, Calif., promises to help analysts make better use of the Central Intelligence Agency's enormous electronic archives. Analysts also could be alerted when a helicopter or other targeted item appears in a live video broadcast. PiXlogic is set to announce that the CIA's venture-capital organization, In-Q-Tel, has invested an unspecified amount to help...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Many automobile buffs love their cars so much that they give them names. Now, new research shows that car lovers use the same part of the brain to identify cars that they use when recognizing faces. The findings, which appear in the journal Nature Neuroscience, add to previous studies showing that other avid hobbyists, including bird watchers and dog-show judges, identify the objects of their affection "holistically" rather than by first recognizing individual features. By studying how experts learn this ability, it may be possible to develop ways to help people who have problems with...