INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Microsoft is pulling out of an investment in an Israeli facial recognition technology developer as part of a broader policy shift to halt
any minority investments in facial recognition startups, the company announced late last week.
The decision to withdraw its investment from
AnyVision, an Israeli company developing facial recognition software, came as a result of an investigation into reports that AnyVision
technology was being used by the Israeli government to surveil residents in the West Bank.
The investigation, conducted by former U.S
Attorney General Eric Holder and his team at Covington - Burling, confirmed that AnyVision technology was used to monitor border crossings
between the West Bank and Israel, but did not &power a mass surveillance program in the West Bank.&
Microsoft venture capital arm, M12
Ventures, backed AnyVision as part of the company $74 million financing round which closed in June 2019
Investors who continue to back the company include DFJ Growth and OG Technology Partners, LightSpeed Venture Partners, Robert Bosch GmbH,
Qualcomm Ventures, and Eldridge Industries.
Microsoft first staked out its position on how the company would approach facial recognition
technologies in 2018, when President Brad Smith issued a statement calling on government to come up with clear regulations around facial
recognition in the U.S.
Smith calls for more regulation and oversight became more strident by the end of the year, when Microsoft issued a
statement on its approach to facial recognition.
Smith wrote:
We and other tech companies need to start creating safeguards to address
facial recognition technology
We believe this technology can serve our customers in important and broad ways, and increasingly we&re not just encouraged, but inspired by
many of the facial recognition applications our customers are deploying
But more than with many other technologies, this technology needs to be developed and used carefully
After substantial discussion and review, we have decided to adopt six principles to manage these issues at Microsoft
We are sharing these principles now, with a commitment and plans to implement them by the end of the first quarter in 2019.
The principles
that Microsoft laid out included privileging: fairness, transparency, accountability, non-discrimination, notice and consent, and lawful
surveillance.
Critics took the company to task for its investment in AnyVision, saying that the decision to back a company working with the
Israeli government on wide-scale surveillance ran counter to the principles it had set out for itself.
Now, after determining that
controlling how facial recognition technologies are deployed by its minority investments is too difficult, the company is suspending its
outside investments in the technology.
&For Microsoft, the audit process reinforced the challenges of being a minority investor in a company
that sells sensitive technology, since such investments do not generally allow for the level of oversight or control that Microsoft
exercises over the use of its own technology,& the company wrote in a statement on its M12 Ventures website
&Microsoft focus has shifted to commercial relationships that afford Microsoft greater oversight and control over the use of sensitive
