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Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

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Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#71

Post by tobib »

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.

It's not about that. It's about whether we accept corporate arrogance to make decisions on behalf of a vulnerable demographic.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#72

Post by acdc4life »

kllrnohj wrote: post #43
acdc4life wrote: post #18

Why doesn’t the model trained on one race generalize to different races? That sounds inferior to human vision.

"All X's look the same" where X is any of [Asians, Black people, white people, etc..] is a very common refrain. Human eyes also need to be trained on diverse data. It's the cross-race effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect

The wiki post mentioned that people are right 45% of the time. How does dl and ml stack up? Also not mentioned, how long does it take for humans to start recognizing new races, vs ml and dl?

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#73

Post by DoreenMichele »

microtherion wrote: post #67
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."

But now they have a dataset where a disproportionate proportion (possibly the last majority) of people of color represented were homeless. That's bound to introduce other kinds of bias into the data.

Such as what? Some bizarre and unfounded idea that poverty and skin color have some correlation?

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#74

Post by username90 »

JohnFen wrote: post #37
aantix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd argue that people care much more about consent than they care about privacy. Like, lots of people give away money for free to beggars but they wouldn't be very happy if a beggar robbed them of the same amount of money.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#75

Post by phjesusthatguy3 »

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…

You're selling yourself short.

Google, et al, want to use my likeness to facilitate database lookups. They are welcome to a perpetual, exclusive license of that data at a quarter of a trillion USD. They know how to get in touch with me; I'm 100% serious.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#76

Post by JohnFen »

privateSFacct wrote: post #56
JohnFen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the analogy is a poor one, but let's run with it anyway. No, you are not responsible because the teen was not operating within the terms of the contract. You did not authorize or ask him to get stoned or run someone over.

Did google authorize (or even think) that their staff would contract with a company that would hire folks who would scan homeless people's faces in a way that was improper?

I don't know. I do know that in these kinds of situations, the contract typically spells out clearly what, exactly, the contractor is going to do and how, though.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#77

Post by NoodleIncident »

tobib wrote: post #69
kauffj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's your point? You choose to do it because you don't care about giving your face picture to someone, fine. You're in a totally different position, financially independent I assume, you can weigh your options. A homeless person might not be in a situation like that. They're much more vulnerable and possibly willing to do things out of sheer desperation. Things they wouldn't do if they were in a different situation…

Don't wear yourself out moving those goalposts. First you accuse him of lying about what he said; then when he offers proof, suddenly it doesn't matter whether he's willing to do it himself or not.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#78

Post by jakelazaroff »

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…

The issue is not that the contractor only marginally helped these people. It’s that they exploited a massive power imbalance in order to reap a vastly larger reward than they offered.

“Copenhagen Ethics” really just strikes me as a rhetorical tool to defend exploitation. “What, just because I offered this person a job I have to pay them a minimum wage?”

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#79

Post by kortilla »

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…

>gut feeling tells me that's not the case for most people for privacy or ethical reasons

Your gut is sadly wrong. The majority of people still do not actually care about privacy when there is more than a few cents of value being offered.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#80

Post by tengbretson »

CydeWeys wrote: post #70
tengbretson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument applies equally well to buying kidneys from homeless people for $20. I hope we agree that that's bad.

Oh come on, surely you must realize that selling limited copyright to a digital likeness of your face is much different than selling a literal body part.

Of course it's different. It's obviously different. That doesn't make "if it was a bad exchange they wouldn't do it" a good argument in support of either of those examples.
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