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Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

theverge.com

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Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#31

Post by ehsankia »

xenocyon wrote: post #5
ehsankia wrote: post #2

At 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…

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.

That's entirely fair, I'm not absolving Google here, they should vet their contractors and make sure the job is done right. We probably won't know but I would like to know where these decisions came from as you mention. I just don't see the incentive for Google to push for such a messy work, I highly doubt there's a lack of people who would be happy to give their face data for 5$.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#32

Post by aantix »

tobib wrote: post #27
kauffj wrote: post #11

Kudos 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…

I don’t think most people care about privacy all that much.

Most live publicly with their faces on display for all to see and others taking it a step further, participating in Facebook alongside billions of others.

It doesn’t scream facial identity being a major concern.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#33

Post by [deleted] »

kauffj wrote: post #11

Kudos 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…

[deleted]

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#34

Post by mattnewton »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #15

There's a long, long history of leaving women, people of color, poor people and other groups out of data sets. For example, I've read articles that indicate we can't create good photos of people of color because film standards were normalized to white skin. So, try to fix that and... there's hell to pay? File under: "No good deed goes unpunished."

I don't think there is anything wrong with the memo saying "we need more people of color in our data set." I hope everyone agrees with that.

What seems to have been bad is the contractor misinforming people about what data would be collected (and for what use), and it's not clear what Google had in their contract to prevent that kind of unethical behavior. It is also very questionable IMO to target the homeless "because they won't talk to the media" which was allegedly in the instructions the contracting firm Randstad gave to it's workers.

Disclaimer: While I work as a low level employee at an unrelated team in Google, my opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer, and this is the first I am hearing of this.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#35

Post by moate »

mgraczyk wrote: post #9

This 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…

OOF. That's not how this works sir. Did you read the article? Some quotes:

“They said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” the ex-staffer said. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.”

Some were told to gather the face data by characterizing the scan as a “selfie game” similar to Snapchat, they said. One said workers were told to say things like, “Just play with the phone for a couple minutes and get a gift card,” and, “We have a new app, try it and get $5.”

Google (or their contractor if you're going to fight about the semantics here) is, at worst, guilty of misleading people about what they were doing, targeting vulnerable people with the expressed idea that they would be less likely to create problems, and not actually improving anyone's conditions in a real way by doing this.

Here's the moral convictions I have: lying to someone about what is happening to you in order to create a functioning business is bad business. It's entirely removed from the fact that small increments of money were given to some homeless people. I don't get to abuse homeless people as long as I give them 5 dollars afterwards. That's not how morality works. These people weren't lifted out of their conditions because of this life-changing sum. They weren't put into treatment centers or given job training. They were purposefully mislead and then compensated less than the price of a combo meal at McDonald's.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#36

Post by username90 »

I remember the outrage when people discovered that Google's AI wasn't properly trained on black faces. It makes sense that they try hard to avoid that happening again by paying black people to let Google scan their faces. It is not unethical to try to diversify your training data.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11710136/Googl...

Anyway, this part sounds directly illegal, seems like it was just Randstad being greedy but if anyone from Google knew about it then it is bad but I doubt that they couldn't budget enough money to get the scans legally:

> They said Randstad project leaders specifically told the TVCs to (...) conceal the fact that people’s faces were being recorded and even lie to maximize their data collections.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-google-darker-s...

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#37

Post by JohnFen »

aantix wrote: post #32
tobib wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don’t think most people care about privacy all that much. Most live publicly with their faces on display for all to see and others taking it a step further, participating in Facebook alongside billions of others. It doesn’t scream facial identity being a major concern.

I think most people actually care quite a lot.

That people live their lives accepting that their faces are on display is not evidence otherwise, since there is literally no other option.

Participating Facebook is also not evidence otherwise -- at most, it's evidence that people are willing to trade privacy in some circumstances (and I think even that's a bit of a stretch), but I'll bet that most Facebook users would object to having their privacy invaded without their consent -- which means they care about privacy.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#38

Post by kauffj »

tobib wrote: post #27
kauffj wrote: post #11

Kudos 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…

If you or anyone:

- Provides a link or method to create the scan that takes just a few minutes (on Ubuntu)

- Sends $5 to kauffj@gmail.com via PayPal or via BTC to 17h2GtaBzivnNtP24qoGg4a3pjgShkw7MD

I will complete the process and post the result in this thread.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#39

Post by DoreenMichele »

mattnewton wrote: post #34
DoreenMichele wrote: post #15

There's a long, long history of leaving women, people of color, poor people and other groups out of data sets. For example, I've read articles that indicate we can't create good photos of people of color because film standards were normalized to white skin. So, try to fix that and... there's hell to pay? File under: "No good deed goes unpunished."

I don't think there is anything wrong with the memo saying "we need more people of color in our data set." I hope everyone agrees with that. What seems to have been bad is the contractor misinforming people about what data would be collected (and for what use), and it's not clear what Google had in their contract to prevent that kind of unethical behavior. It is also very questionable IMO to target the homeless "beca…

It also seems bad to Target the homeless "because they won't talk to the media" or whatever the quote was.

To me, this just parses as "We have some new Politically Correct excuse to exclude poor people from our dataset."

Being so unimportant that the world wants you to remain invisible isn't generally a good thing.

There is always some excuse. There is no condition under which it is sufficiently respectful, politely handled, blah blah blah to be A Good Idea.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#40

Post by JohnFen »

ehsankia wrote: post #2

At 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…

> The original source mentions Google in the headline but the rest of articles only refers to Randstad.

If you hire a contractor, you are responsible for what the contractor is doing unless the contractor is operating outside of the terms of the contract.

If the contractor is within the terms of the contract, saying that "Google is doing this" is not deceptively inaccurate.

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