As a provider of mission-critical solutions to public safety and enterprise organizations, Motorola Solutions is proud of the role we play in helping businesses thrive and keeping communities safer. Our products are designed to deliver in the moments that matter – providing effortless and reliable communications with essential insights that improve public safety outcomes.
In keeping with this commitment, Motorola Solutions’ goal is to design our technologies so that they work in accordance with the highest ethical standards. This has been a core tenet of our company for almost one hundred years. Today, this extends to our suite of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered solutions as we work to address public safety and commercial needs with state-of-the-art solutions that safeguard individual privacy rights. We are committed to the responsible use of analytics and data management, where we take a rigorous approach to the application of AI – including facial recognition technology – which supports the fundamental tenets of fairness, privacy, understandability and reliability. Specifically, our solutions support:
- Human in the Loop: The AI augments the decision-making by the human user, and will never displace human judgement and make significant decisions on its own.
- Focused Application: We identify specific areas for improvement and optimally surface AI in the customer workflow. Simply put, we use AI to help our users be better at what they already do manually
- Mature AI: We apply proven AI technologies that are extensively trained, tested and well understood.
Regarding facial recognition technology, we recognize that there are privacy concerns. Importantly, we also believe that, when designed and used responsibly, facial recognition and video analytics are incredibly powerful tools that can assist in numerous ways, including helping businesses, schools and communities make better informed decisions that empower them to respond to events proactively and keep their constituents safer.
For example, facial recognition technologies help organizations strengthen the safety and security of their facilities by:
- Controlling access to sensitive areas by applying facial recognition checks for entry;
- Identifying a person of interest entering a facility (e.g., a former employee attempting to enter a factory);
- Identifying missing or lost individuals (e.g. Amber or Silver alert);
- Investigating allegations of wrongdoing, such as serial shoplifting or a pervasive hostile work environment;
- Monitoring school zones for the presence of registered sex offenders, red-flag students and estranged spouses, among others; and
- Combating child sex trafficking by matching images with those of lost or missing children.
Through new AI-powered facial recognition features and analytics, our newest ACC 7.6 enables enterprise customers to better monitor their facilities. To cite a specific use case, with the continued heightened vigilance across school campuses, district officials are able to employ the technology to assist staff in identifying anyone deemed a threat to the students and staff on campus. These individuals’ photos are added to the watchlist and when a match is made, the school’s security members receive a notification so that they can take proactive measures to assess the situation and help maintain the safety of students and staff.
The introduction of this technology is a part of Motorola Solutions’ ongoing commitment to creating world-class public safety solutions that also safeguard individual privacy rights and support the responsible use of analytics and data management. The video management capabilities in ACC 7.6 include robust controls to govern a user’s access to the system as well as the retention and accessibility of data. Audits are generated to track user operations enabling our customers to enforce accountability across their users. These features are built into the solution natively, meaning that the technology is developed and owned by Motorola Solutions as opposed to a third-party vendor. In addition, as part of our focus on the “human in the loop” principle, the new facial recognition capabilities do not make consequential decisions or initiate actions on their own. Studies have shown definitively that the most accurate results come from a combination of humans and technology in collaboration versus either individually. Further, the data entered and saved in the system is owned and managed by customers employing the technology. These are the types of safeguards we implement across the products and solutions we develop.
With ACC 7.6, as well as with our broader portfolio of services that depend on AI technology, we support and exercise responsible use of AI-powered technology because we believe in its tremendous potential to deliver mission-critical information that helps save lives and improves outcomes. At the core of our AI-powered analytics and facial recognition features is our commitment to making the businesses we support and the communities in which we live and work safer and more secure – and we are doing so by implementing these technologies responsibly and ethically.
We also recommend our customers engage in best practices for the use of facial recognition:
- Potential facial recognition matches should always be assessed and verified by trained security personnel who can then determine whether further investigation or action is necessary;
- In a commercial enterprise setting, there should be signage alerting users of facial recognition technology in use; and transparency as to the usage;
- The parameters of facial recognition use should be defined in a comprehensive policy, consistent with applicable laws and regulations;
- Thoroughly train their users on the products and policies surrounding its use. Motorola Solutions provides a full training series on our products.
At Motorola Solutions, we are proud of our long history of developing innovative technologies, just as we are proud of our long history of being a responsible, trusted partner that holds itself to the highest ethical standards. There are many valid concerns regarding AI and facial recognition, but you can rest assured that Motorola Solutions’ products and solutions have been specifically designed to safeguard privacy rights. In fact, Motorola Solutions supports reasonable regulation designed to ensure responsible use of AI. Our focus is on the delivery of accurate, reliable and relevant data that can benefit our customers, and society overall, while ensuring that data is captured and handled in a responsible manner. That is our commitment.
