Welcome to the Official Schedule for RightsCon 2019, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.
Together at RightsCon Tunis, our first summit hosted in the Middle East and North Africa, more than 2500 expert practitioners will come together across over 400 sessions to shape, contribute to, and drive forward the global agenda for the future of our human rights.
Important note: Whether you’re a session organizer, speaker, or participant, you’ll need to login to Sched or create an account in order to get the most out of the program (including creating a profile and building your own customized RightsCon schedule).
In July 2018, Microsoft shared its call for government regulation and responsible industry governance of facial recognition technology. This technology clearly brings important societal benefits, but we recognize the risks which need broader study and discussion. We’ve been pursuing these issues with technologists, civil society, academics and policymakers to expand our understanding of the risks, including in the contexts of bias, privacy and surveillance, and to develop our 6 principles to manage our development and use of facial recognition. We believe there are three problems that governments need to address: 1. Certain uses of facial recognition technology increase the risk of decisions and outcomes that are biased. 2. The widespread use of this technology can lead to new intrusions into privacy. 3. The use of facial recognition technology by a government or law enforcement for mass surveillance can harm democratic freedoms. All three of these problems should be addressed through legislation by requiring transparency, enabling third part testing, ensuring meaningful human review, avoiding the use for unlawful discrimination, ensuring notice, clarifying consent, and limiting on-going government surveillance of specified individuals.
