Privacy activists say Microsoft's funding of Israeli facial recognition company AnyVision contradicts its public calls for facial recognition regulation
Thomas Brewster / Forbes : Tweets: @hamza13sg and @kenroth Tweets: Hamza H / @hamza13sg : “Microsoft is under fire for funding the Israeli facial recognition company AnyVision, which is reportedly carrying out surveillance on Palestinians. AnyVision also supplies technology in Russia and Hong Kong, where human rights are under attack.” https://www.forbes.com/... Kenneth Roth / @kenroth : Microsoft pledged to avoid complicity in abusive use of facial-recognition technology, so why is it investing in a company that provides that technology to the governments of Russia, Israel, and Hong Kong? https://www.forbes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft President Brad Smith had already staked the company's public position by calling for government regulation of facial recognition and defending its ICE contract as not involving the technology (Brad Smith's 2018 call for regulation). This report puts that position on a collision course with Microsoft's own checkbook: activists Kenneth Roth and Hamza H are calling out the AnyVision investment over reported surveillance of Palestinians and deployments tied to Russia and Hong Kong.
The criticism became a live governance problem rather than a one-day story — Microsoft later hired Eric Holder to audit whether AnyVision met the ethical principles attached to its Series A (the Holder-led compliance review), and ultimately exited third-party facial recognition investing altogether (the AnyVision divestment).
First-order effects
- Microsoft's regulation advocacy loses credibility while it remains an AnyVision backer, giving critics like Kenneth Roth a concrete contradiction to press publicly.
- AnyVision's reported government work in Israel, Russia, and Hong Kong now attaches to Microsoft by association, raising the reputational cost of the Series A stake.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft is pushed into hiring former AG Eric Holder to test AnyVision against the ethical principles stipulated at investment — turning an equity bet into a formal ethics-review burden.
- The episode feeds the broader scrutiny of Western tech ties to state biometric surveillance, alongside investigations like the one finding IBM, Hikvision, and Huawei supporting a UAE system in Dubai (the Dubai biometric surveillance investigation).
Third-order effects
- If activist pressure keeps converting ethics pledges into portfolio decisions, venture-style backing of facial-recognition startups becomes a liability surface for large tech investors, not just a returns play.
- Corporate self-regulation of dual-use technology increasingly gets stress-tested by journalists and NGOs before regulators act, making voluntary principles enforceable through reputational channels.
The trend: Activist and press scrutiny is forcing major tech investors to police their facial-recognition portfolios against their own stated ethical principles.