Microsoft is getting ready to market the most sophisticated spying software yet, a perfect tool for spooks.
From BBC News:
Technology giant Microsoft has filed a patent for a system to monitor employees’ body language and facial expressions during work meetings and give the events a “quality score”.
A filing suggests it could be deployed in real-world meetings or online virtual get-togethers.
It envisions rooms being packed with sensors to monitor the participants, which could raise privacy concerns.
Microsoft is already under fire over a separate “productivity-score” tool.
While it’s being pitched as a tool to make meetings better, the patent application cites the software’s “meeting productivity metric, a participant emotional sentiment metric, and an environmental comfort metric.”
The system also evaluates body language, speech patterns, attentiveness, and boredom, according to the patent application.
Logically, those same “metrics” could be applied to a workplace and a police interrogation room, or to surveillance of a meeting of activists under scrutiny by the state or to over-stressed workers in an Amazon warehouse.
Likewise, program modules could be fitted, for example, to police surveillance devices like body cams and police car cameras.
If nothing else, we are being given a glimpse of what will be the surveillance standard of the future, and it’s rather chilling.
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