In the second part of this episode, she explains the racial bias we often seen in facial recognition technologies and how the data collection practices of Google’s contractors echo a long history of scientists taking advantage of vulnerable communities of color. Ruha Benjamin studies the intersection of race, science, and technology at Princeton University.
This isn’t the first time researchers have taken questionable steps with regard to people of color in the name of something noble. We found that in trying to create a biometric facial recognition feature, which would allow your face to unlock your phone, they needed to build a big database of faces so that they could - these are their words - “train the machine,” so that the technology recognizes all the different varieties of people that there are.Īnd so to do that, they sent teams of people out to collect facial scans and the people collecting them - the for-hire workers - were not upfront or clear about what they were gathering the data for, what the people needed to do, what they were giving consent for, and in some cases they targeted specific groups with darker skin tones. Ginger Adams Otis - who, along with her colleague Nancy Dillion, broke that story - joins Reset host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to share what they learned: The explicit promotion of this was a big deal: Google was basically saying, “We see you, and this phone was made with you in mind!”īut then, the New York Daily News reported exactly how Google was making its tech more inclusive. The technology often misidentifies them, or doesn’t detect them at all. But a promotional video about the Pixel 4 suggested the company was trying to solve a problem: Facial recognition technology is notoriously bad at detecting people with dark skin.
But there’s one specific feature that’s gotten a lot of attention: using your face to unlock the phone.įacial recognition isn’t new in tech iPhones have been able to do this since 2017. So the stuff that Google said at the launch was kind of old news. Its features were the worst-kept secret in tech. There’s been hype around this phone for months. On October 15, Google announced its latest phone: the Pixel 4.
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