Hear hear, this is what racism is, not an algorithm that underperforms in certain situations.

For any algo, I'm sure you'll find features where it underperforms, and since, well, photos are 90% race-determined, of course there will be racial differences.

Bureaucracy doing its best to not deliver what the law says it should is, meanwhile, blatant racism. Just sounds less exciting than a Skynet-style racist operation of white men forcing Asian women to join a different queue at the airport.

> Is this really a bias?

Not making your software function properly for all the legitimate input it has to deal with is a bias. Not working to eliminate that bias because it affects a group you don't happen to be part of could even be called racist.

The vast majority of software has bugs especially around edge cases that aren't frequently encountered. Sometimes it isn't even worth fixing somethings as they are expected so infrequently, it's easier to fix things by hand or via some other hack.

Are you asserting that people with dark skin need photo ID more “infrequently” than others? That it “isn't even worth fixing”? Then that's how the bias in your thinking translates directly into bad and racist software.

You are arguing for the developer's convenience. Good software is about providing functionality to users, not developer's convenience.

That's straw-manning my argument, I didn't say any of that. But as you bring it up, so far this case has come up once, so it does seem to be a rare edge case.

Perfection is the enemy of good and many bugs get relabelled features (and no I am not doing that in this case, just pointing out that software development always involves trade offs).

And stop calling it racist. Racist used to be something pretty bad, now it's being applied to everything.