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Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by danso on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @07:48PM (#16703194)
I think that's likely. But the people tasked to solve these problems aren't always given the right priorities. Detecting/classifying the faces of dark-skinned humans is inextricably more complicated than it is with light-skinned humans. It requires significantly more training data, more computational power, and more testing time to reach the same accuracy as a light-skin-only camera and classifier.

We would deride Uber's self-driving vehicles if it turns out their systems can't tell the difference between harmless (plastic bags) and dangerous (jaywalkers, wildlife) objects on the road. Likewise, we can judge a company for releasing a general consumer webcam that fails to fully function for 10-15% of the American population.

Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by pixl97 on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @10:55PM (#16704187)
>Likewise, we can judge a company for releasing a general consumer webcam that fails to fully function for 10-15% of the American population.

But then you get into an even deeper question 'are minorities/blacks 10% of said consumers of products?'. Poverty, for example, could mean that the product doesn't work for 5% of the buyers, which then begs the question 'how much effort do you put in fixing the problem for a small percentage of the buyers?', especially when the amount of effort is going to be very large/time consuming/expensive. If you are a person looking for racism, you will judge google as racist. If you are looking at it from a position of a business attempting to make a profit on a product, you will not see it as racist.

Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by sangnoir on Thursday March 29, 2018 @01:29AM (#16704709)
> But then you get into an even deeper question 'are minorities/blacks 10% of said consumers of products?'.

Maybe run that question by legal first! Protected classes exist for a good reason (IMO). What percentage of a restaurant's business is from people in wheelchairs, yet the law mandates ramp access.

Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls by labster on Wednesday March 28, 2018 @09:07PM (#16703691)
This is very true. I suppose a mirror isn't quite the right analogy for Google, either. It's like film, a snapshot of what it thinks life is like. And for film, there are lots of technical problems for filming black actors, the likes of which had been solved 60 years prior for white actors[0]. It's very possible that the algorithm, captures a version of reality that doesn't show people of color in a good light.

And yes, these problems should be solved, and Google should use its editorial control to do the right thing. I believe it has done so, though perhaps not proactively enough. But these are hard problems, ones that are still not solved in other industries. Web search is still a young industry.

[0]: https://mic.com/articles/184244/keeping-insecure-lit-hbo-cin...