Zoom Wants To Track Your Emotions, Here’s What You Should Know
A collective of 28 human rights organizations has urged Zoom to halt its work on an emotion tracking system that aims to analyze the engagement and sentiments of users. Of course, the idea sounds invasive from the get-go, but it is not the first project of its kind when it comes to the end goal. There are already a ton of software products out there targeted at remote workers that track everything from mouse clicks to web activity on behalf of employers.
These products already have divided opinions, but monitoring user activity happens in all shapes and forms, and sometimes, from extremely unsuspecting sources. A recent investigation uncovered that a healthy number of mental health and meditation apps engaged in data mining and handed it over to third parties for advertising. But the scope of monitoring user activity widened in the pandemic era under the garb of corporate solutions for assessing the availability and attentiveness of workers. It appears that Zoom, one of the biggest success stories in this era of dramatic work shift, was also engaged in a concerning project of its own.
Related: Zoom Will Now Bust You If You're Late To A Meeting
Fight for the Future, alongside 27 other human rights organizations, has written an open letter to Zoom, calling it to halt the AI-driven emotion tracking software that studies the facial expression of video call participants. The organization classified the software as “discriminatory, manipulative, potentially dangerous,” further pointing out that it is based on the flawed assumption that markers such as voice pattern, facial expressions, and body language are uniform for all people. There is valid concern behind the criticism, as facial recognition algorithms and other AI-based
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