This time with feeling, the failure of facial coding and what next

Co-authored with Dr. Lachlan Urquhart from the University of Edinburgh, the paper ‘‘This time with feeling?’ Assessing EU data governance implications of out of home appraisal based emotional AI;’ is now out.

What is it about and why does it matter? Criticisms of facial coding have long existed, but recent scholarship and industrial development is bringing about widespread as well as specialist mistrust. On the one hand this is good – lots of folk have been quick to label this as pseudoscience. Less thought has gone into implications of industrial remedies. We argue that this will inevitably entail use of data about internal physiological and experiential contexts, but also factors external to an individual, i.e. likely to be even more invasive practices. To explore this, this paper asks and answers the following question: With regard to deployment in out-of-home situations, what are the legal and privacy implications of contextual and appraisal-based emotion capture?

Oh, and it’s open access :)