Microsoft Looms Over the Privacy Debate in Its Home State
Two Microsoft employees sat opposite one another in a Washington State Senate hearing room last Wednesday. Ryan Harkins, the company’s senior director of public policy, spoke in support of a proposed law that would regulate government use of facial recognition. “We would applaud the committee and all of the bill sponsors for all of their work to tackle this important issue,” he said.
On a dais among his fellow lawmakers sat the bill’s primary sponsor, Joseph Nguyen, a state senator and program manager at Microsoft. The occasion was a legislative hearing on Nguyen’s proposal and a second, broader privacy bill, also supported by both Nguyen and Microsoft, that restricts some private uses of facial recognition.
The two bills are drawing interest from the tech industry, in part because they are seen as potential models for other states, or even federal lawmakers. The Washington bills, which have bipartisan support, would introduce restrictions on facial recognition, which is unregulated in most places today. The laws would require stores using the technology to disclose its use to consumers, and force police to obtain a warrant before scanning faces in public. But the proposals stop far short of the bans on the technology adopted by cities including San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and being considered by the European Union.
