A while ago Google got bad press because some image-tagging service identified some people as "gorillas", and IIRC it was blamed on not having enough diversity of skin color in the training data. So... it sounds like at least the "instructed them to target people of color" part of this is them trying to correct that. But in isolation that sounds even worse than the first instance. I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
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Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#22How dare they give $5 to homeless people instead of college students walking around campus with airpods.
Yeah, usually you have to pay at least minimum wage to exploit college students.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO an entity is ethically responsible for anything its contractor does, unless there is reasonable clarity that the contractor acted in opposition to the client's wishes. Having someone else do your dirty work doesn't make it less dirty.
If I order a pizza and the stoned teenager from the local joint runs over a pedestrian, am I ethically responsible? I didn't tell them to not hit people when getting my meat lovers to me and did say I wanted it ASAP.
The pizza joint hired the stoned teen, he's not contracted by you.
It's a pretty rotten analogy.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#24Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objec…
Giving $5 to a homeless person doesn't help them.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#25This strikes me as the ethically best possible way to collect this data. Google is paying people who need the money for something simple and completely harmless. The main counterargument appears to be that those who sold data "didn't understand what was going on". It's hard to imagine moral convictions in which someone could consistently argue that the homeless don't understand money in exchange for photos, but it's…
> This strikes me as the ethically best possible way to collect this data
"a contracting agency named Randstad sent teams to Atlanta explicitly to target homeless people and those with dark skin, often without saying they were working for Google, and without letting on that they were actually recording people’s faces"
How can this be the most ethical way to collect data?
The problem isn't in acquiring facial recognition data from homeless people, but in mischaracterising the nature of the experiment when doing so. If the reporting is accurate, they lied to vulnerable people and tricked them into selling their data for cheap.
Companies can't go around hustling people into giving away their private information. It doesn't matter if you think this is "for their own good", a homeless person may want to refuse being catalogued by Google for a variety of reasons.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#26Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objec…
$5 isn't much. Why not post here a picture and 3d scan of your face as a token of good will?
It could help some start-ups that need such a face for demo purposes or other experiments.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#27Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objec…
> I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself.
Would you really? My gut feeling tells me that's not the case for most people for privacy or ethical reasons. Just because those people are poor, we expect them to have lower privacy or ethical standards.
The link you posted has the following example, I think you're referring to that
> BBH Labs was an exception – they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations.
That's completely different. Offering Wifi has zero long term effects. It's providing people with a "business opportunity" that wouldn't have access to it otherwise. Giving someone 5 bucks for their face picture (or other biometrics) is totally different and has long term negative effects.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#28At least the Verge has the less clickbait headline, mentioning that it was contractors. The original source mentions Google in the headline but the rest of articles only refers to Randstad. One part that is a bit confusing to me is, the original source makes no references whatsoever to any consent form. Usually you can't collect this sort of data without signed consent, and previous reports [0] do mention such a form…
I'm on the fence regarding whether it's unfair for the a news source to attribute this sin directly to Google via its headline. "Actually, it was our contractors who did it" seems like too common and easy an excuse for companies and governments who want to outsource the blame and the fallout for their questionable projects.
I don't really understand what would Google's motive be. They're already paying 5$, and I highly doubt they'd have a hard time finding people rushing to give away 5m of their time and their face for 5$ (people outside of HN are far less techno paranoid).
To me, it just sounds like the contractor tried to get done with it asap and just half-assed the work.
Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#29It sounds like there were three issues: 1. The contractor targeted homeless people 2. They targeted people with darker skin 3. They may not have been forthright or truthful about what they were doing. Number 3 is clearly wrong. But I think so long as the contractors were upfront and truthful about what they were doing, I don't know if 1 or 2 are problematic. The only argument I can see for why they shouldn't pay home…
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Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I order a pizza and the stoned teenager from the local joint runs over a pedestrian, am I ethically responsible? I didn't tell them to not hit people when getting my meat lovers to me and did say I wanted it ASAP.
The pizza joint hired the stoned teen, he's not contracted by you. It's a pretty rotten analogy.
The pizza joint hired the teen, I contracted the pizza joint to get me a pizza. The teen did it a shitty way that is hard to be expected.
Randstad hired the people, Google contracted Randstad to do a job. Randstad's people did it in a shitty way that is hard to expected.
It's a pretty fresh analogy.