Well, I suggest an outright total ban on anything that purports to read people's emotions. Either it doesn't work, in which case it shouldn't be used, or it does work, in which case it shouldn't be used.
Suppose there's a browser plugin that uses sentiment analysis on text fields to try to detect text written in anger. And it doesn't do anything with the information except warn you so you can think twice before posting an angry comment to social media or sending an angry email. Should that be illegal?
Or maybe it more directly tries to sense emotion by using your webcam to look at your facial expression.
That would be acceptable collateral damage, if it couldn't be permitted without opening the door for the creation of systems that used the information against the analyzed people's interests.
I'd be willing to at least consider a carefully crafted exception. The problem being that when you write such an exception, it tends to be awfully easy to introduce loopholes that, in practice, allow using uninformed pseudo-consent, or false consent with no real alternative available, to use information against people.
The thing is, if you include something like that (i.e. sentiment analysis as crude, rudimentary way of looking at people's emotions), the genie is out of the bottle - it's a widespread task that's used as a relatively simple homework excercise in undergrad courses, you would need to censor it out of textbooks worldwide, which is a quite big issue to say at least.
I.e. my point is that such a ban would have to be very extensive and invasive, with obvious censorship of small, simple segments of code and whole avenues of basic knowledge. Given some data, you can get a crude emotion detector from facial images or text messages - not state of art but somewhat accurate - with something like ten lines of code, with no previous skill on "emotion analysis", just applying generic ML approaches. I can't imagine how such a ban could be implemented, as so many people would still be able to easily make such systems whenever they wanted to, so the ban wouldn't be effective.
Perhaps you could regulate the application of automated decision making to decisions about people and requiring some review-and-override mechanisms (GDPR has some limited aspects of that), but it's a very different area than just banning knowledge and skills that already exist and are relatively widespread.
People can read other people's emotions. You can build a mechanical turk program that's effectively the same as having a personal concierge agent with respect to the regulation.
Like, if you ban reading people's emotions you effectively have to also ban any human interaction.
The problem is making assumptions about why people are experiencing certain emotions, or telling people they are wrong when they say, "I'm actually not angry"
Yes, but this can happen just as easily with human actors as it can with non-human actors.
I suppose the benefit of a human actor is that you can theoretically fine or jail them if they're found to be malicious or sufficiently incompetent.
However, on the other hand, human actors can explain why they're doing the right thing. Even when they are in fact doing the wrong thing. An AI that is broken incomprehensibly can still be determined to be broken. The human actor causing issues can produce very convincing arguments to avoid termination. Also they can bring in donuts every Thursday to stay on the bottom of the termination list.
[And to be clear. I don't trust the technology at all. I just also don't trust the human system either. A system isn't better because innocent people are oppressed by humans instead of by a computer.]
It's still completely reasonable to ban automating it. The impact of having it done in an automated way is completely different from the impact of having it done on a person-to-person basis, for a lot of reasons, starting with scale.
It's also reasonable to ban anything that claims to be better at it than a human.
I don't think it's completely reasonable to ban it. Although, I would agree that it's completely reasonable to restrict nearly anything.
Although, I do like your comment about scale. If you have a system that's 99% successful, then if you apply it to everyone in the US then you're failing 3 million people. That's a problem.
Of course, your system might be mechanical OR it might just be a group of people each one just "doing their job." From a result oriented point of view, you might end up with a mechanical system that oppresses less people than a people system.
I don't feel good about either one, but I also don't feel good about causing wide scale misery because at least it's people screwing over other people instead of a machine screwing over people.
[Of course it's worth noting that I don't trust the technology at all. It's just that I also don't trust the human solution that it claims it can replace.]
Suppose someone, for example a depressed person, wants to use it to monitor their emotional state and use various automated responses like notifications or distractions to help maintain an emotional state they want?
I think this viewpoint is limited. Sometimes reading peoples' emotions can be an extremely good thing.
I am aware of a healthcare company which currently has a model in production which alerts healthcare providers if a person displays suicidal intent. They have several confirmed instances deaths being prevented because of the interventions taken due to alerts from their model. While I don't think ML should be used to manipulate people's emotional states, I think this is a case where having a model that can read people's emotions is a good thing.
The funny thing is that by totally banning "anything that purports to read people's emotions" you also ban research that would help people. For example you need to train models to detect race in order to make sure there are no racial biases in another model you want to deploy.
Or maybe it more directly tries to sense emotion by using your webcam to look at your facial expression.