Laptop camera "is racist"!

[baratron]

This video is making the news: HP Computers are racist. "Black Desi" and "White Wanda" show what happens when they move in front of a new HP laptop with a face recognition camera. The camera moves to track the light-skinned woman, but does not move for the dark-skinned man - even when he gets close.

Of course, the computers aren't really racist - it's a technology problem to do with lighting and shadows. Kudos for the video makers in pointing out the issue without losing their sense of humour. Still, you have to wonder - do technology companies not think to routinely test out "people recognition" technologies with people of many different appearances? including different ages, races, and the disabled, whose faces may not move in a typical way? If not, why not? If technology doesn't work in the same way for everyone, then it is a sort of racism by omission or lack of thought. Unintentional, but hurtful nonetheless.

Comments

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced that HP acted by omission or lack of thought here. There seems to be evidence (both by HP itself and independently verified here (http://blog.laptopmag.com/hp-webcam) by K. Tempest Bradford) that HP has compensation factors that can be applied to people who do not have naturally high contrast between their eyes and cheekbones. These aren't patches that were rolled out after the YouTube video, so it seems to me that they must have been very aware of and concerned by the limitations of their algorithm.

One might argue that HP should have spent an extra few months in the lab making the tech work equally well for everyone under typical lighting conditions before releasing face tracking as a feature, so I think that they deserve something less than top marks even if this isn't total "fail". There might also be a story about why the universal adjustments aren't applied to the floor models at the warehouse stores and why Desi and Wanda aren't knowledgeable enough about their products to either fix the contrast or at least know that the option is available.