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Today I was unable to take a picture in a photo kiosk

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Re: Today I was unable to take a picture in a photo kiosk

#21

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

Waterluvian wrote: post #18
gregoriol wrote: post #2

People tend to think of this as horrible discriminating decisions made by some horrible people, but most likely it is a very cheap machine developed by an intern who had 3 days to make something work...

Trivially fixable even in that fairly inexcusable case: add an override button. "by overriding you accept that this photo may ultimately be rejected for passport use."

There is an option to override, it’s just not visible in the picture.

The booth is asking the user to “touch an option” but only 1 option is visible, the option to retake the photo has a “attempts remaining” counter and that the company logo is in the middle of the photo preview (the photo preview is in the middle of two options, which will make the company logo centred on the screen).

Re: Today I was unable to take a picture in a photo kiosk

#22

Post by salmo »

I saw a great talk at a conference about this by a woman from the University of Florida. I am sorry I don't remember her name or the conference. But this is a classic symptom of lack of diversity of developers (or test subjects). It's like the sinks that don't activate with dark hands (one of her examples). It's another reason we need to focus on developing underrepresented talent.

Re: Today I was unable to take a picture in a photo kiosk

#23

Post by deogeo »

austhrow743 wrote: post #20
deogeo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't clarify much. Is this some kind of official, government-sanctioned kiosk, whose approval of a photo carries some sort of final authority, and it doesn't just pass the photo on to the passport office? Because otherwise, it would work just fine without this enforcement functionality.

Submitting a bad photo with your passport application can really suck. It delays things a lot and potentially even costs you a submission fee. The point of passport photo services is to mimic (or try to) the official government photo reviewers criteria. That's the value it provides. Learning that you will be rejected quickly rather than slowly.

Merely informing you of a bad photo would provide the same value. No need for enforcement.

Re: Today I was unable to take a picture in a photo kiosk

#24

Post by djaque »

gregoriol wrote: post #2

People tend to think of this as horrible discriminating decisions made by some horrible people, but most likely it is a very cheap machine developed by an intern who had 3 days to make something work...

No they don't.

This is without a doubt a product of badly designed software.

That badly designed software is making life difficult for people based on assumptions about race and gender. It's a problem which is worth fixing and deserves attention.

Re: Today I was unable to take a picture in a photo kiosk

#26

Post by coldtea »

thundergolfer wrote: post #14
aaron695 wrote: post #10

Unlike the title this is for a passport photo. You can't smile in a passport photo. If you compare her lips to recommended passport photos she is more smiling. If you look at the 2nd happy looking woman here, you can see her lips are not actually in a smile as much as the twitter pic - https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/apply-for-... Twitter pic has a dour expression but AI isn't fooled, it looks at li…

We don’t need more evidence. The person in the picture is not smiling and their mouth is not open. The picture meets every criteria listed on the website you linked. It’s totally fine.

>We don’t need more evidence. The person in the picture is not smiling and their mouth is not open.

Well, she looks 100% like she is smiling to me. Her mouth is indeed not open, though, so I'll give you that.

Even if that's her facial structure, and she was consciously not smiling, she does appear to be smiling.

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