More than two dozen human rights groups call on Zoom to halt emotion tracking software plans

Twenty-eight human rights organizations penned a letter to Zoom Wednesday, calling on the company to halt any plans it has for emotion tracking software aimed at assessing users' engagement and sentiment. The groups say the technology is discriminatory, manipulative, punitive, a data security risk and based on pseudoscience. 

"Adopting the junk science of emotion detection on the Zoom platform would be a huge mistake," Tracy Rosenberg, of Oakland Privacy, said in a statement Wednesday. "There is zero reliable evidence that a machine can accurately assess someone's emotional state and a lot of evidence that one-size fits-all assumptions about 'normality' don't mirror human diversity and punish out-groups for differences." 

The letter, addressed to Zoom's CEO Brian Yuan, comes in response to an article published last month by the technology publication Protocol, which reported Zoom was developing technology aimed at evaluating a user's sentiment or engagement level.