Emotion recognition technologies, while critiqued for bias, validity, and privacy invasion, continue to be developed and applied in a range of domains including in high-stakes settings like the workplace. We set out to examine emotion recognition technologies proposed for use in the workplace, describing the input data and training, outputs, and actions that these systems take or prompt. We use these design features to reflect on these technologies' implications using the ethical speculation lens. We analyzed patent applications that developed emotion recognition technologies to be used in the workplace (N=86). We found that these technologies scope data collection broadly; claim to reveal not only targets' emotional expressions, but also their internal states; and take or prompt a wide range of actions, many of which impact workers' employment and livelihoods. Technologies described in patent applications frequently violated existing guidelines for ethical automated emotion recognition technology. We demonstrate the utility of using patent applications for ethical speculation. In doing so, we suggest that 1) increasing the visibility of claimed emotional states has the potential to create additional emotional labor for workers (a burden that is disproportionately distributed to low-power and marginalized workers) and contribute to a larger pattern of blurring boundaries between expectations of the workplace and a worker's autonomy, and more broadly to the data colonialism regime; 2) Emotion recognition technology's failures can be invisible, may inappropriately influence high-stakes workplace decisions and can exacerbate inequity. We discuss the implications of making emotions and emotional data visible in the workplace and submit for consideration implications for designers of emotion recognition, employers who use them, and policymakers. 
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                            Emotion AI at Work: Implications for Workplace Surveillance, Emotional Labor, and Emotional Privacy
                        
                    
    
            Workplaces are increasingly adopting emotion AI, promising benefits to organizations. However, little is known about the perceptions and experiences of workers subject to emotion AI in the workplace. Our interview study with (n=15) US adult workers addresses this gap, finding that (1) participants viewed emotion AI as a deep privacy violation over the privacy of workers’ sensitive emotional information; (2) emotion AI may function to enforce workers’ compliance with emotional labor expectations, and that workers may engage in emotional labor as a mechanism to preserve privacy over their emotions; (3) workers may be exposed to a wide range of harms as a consequence of emotion AI in the workplace. Findings reveal the need to recognize and define an individual right to what we introduce as emotional privacy, as well as raise important research and policy questions on how to protect and preserve emotional privacy within and beyond the workplace. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 2020872
- PAR ID:
- 10437770
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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