When Microsoft announced to much fanfare that they wouldn’t sell police facial recognition, almost no one asked the urgent follow-up question: “What about your other surveillance technology?” The truth is that Microsoft wasn’t selling police facial recognition to begin with, so their “principled stand” was nothing more than free PR. But there is a much less well-known system that Microsoft has sold to police for years, one that is even worse than facial recognition: The Domain Awareness System (DAS).
Microsoft developed the DAS with the NYPD more than a decade ago, integrating tens of thousands of cameras, license plate readers, transit data points, and more. This system forms the backbone of New York’s surveillance-to-prison pipeline, leading to countless stops, arrests, and acts of violence against New Yorkers of color. According to recently released NYPD data, officers were more than five times as likely to kill Black New Yorkers than their white neighbors, an…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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