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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

#91

Post by daniel-cussen »

username90 wrote: post #36

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…

Randstad is dishonest in general.

A friend went through the application and they wanted her to digitally sign 46 contracts, one after the other, without a chance to read the following contract before signing the current one. Including one about an arbitration clause. She did see that the first contract offered to send the rest of the contracts printed, by mail, but when she talked to the rep, he acted like he didn't have access to the contracts he wanted her to sign (yeah right and later he'll be like, well you signed y, so you gave up the right to x, probably knows them by heart), and that she should simply sign them and then go back and print them.

Presumably they have to offer to send them by mail for the contract based on online signatures to be binding, so it's interesting that the rep refused to do so. It was especially sad they have a deal with unemployment offices that funnel workers to them using state funds.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#92

Post by weberc2 »

andrerm wrote: post #65
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…

> which is deplorable. But There is always a but

The period is important. Lying to homeless is deplorable, full stop. But incorporating homeless faces into your training data is not objectionable.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#93

Post by pliny »

tengbretson wrote: post #61
o_p wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, if $0 + not giving face instead of $5 was a superior choice, the homeless would have chosen it, but they didnt.

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

If you allowed people to sell their kidneys the market price would definitely be a lot higher and the trade in kidneys between homeless people and sick people would leave both groups a lot better off. Today you have one group dying in the street and the other dying waiting for a transplant.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#94

Post by jeromebaek »

username90 wrote: post #36

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…

There is a premise in this deduction, which Randstad made: 1. We need darker faces in our training data. 2. Therefore, gather training data from homeless people.

How do you go from 1 to 2? With the premise "darker-faced people tend to be homeless".

This is not necessarily a false premise -- statistically, it is true, and it is a reflection of systemic injustice -- but the outrage is not whether it's true or false; the outrage is that Randstad exploited this painful fact.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#95

Post by l_t »

> Google and Randstad didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.

The content of the article is interesting enough, but this line at the end caught my attention.

Is it reasonable to expect someone to "immediately reply" before you publish the article? Because that doesn't sound like ethical journalism to me, unless I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "immediately" in this context.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#96

Post by ry_ry »

l_t wrote: post #95

> Google and Randstad didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment. The content of the article is interesting enough, but this line at the end caught my attention. Is it reasonable to expect someone to "immediately reply" before you publish the article? Because that doesn't sound like ethical journalism to me, unless I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "immediately" in this context.

Doesn't matter, I suspect - It works within the narrative and implies they have something to hide. It's good /tabloid/ journalism, and poor investigative journalism.

Randstad are very much the former.

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#98

Post by kapuasuite »

aeturnum wrote: post #17
SamBam wrote: post #10

It 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…

If this report is correct it seems like they were targeting a vulnerable population based on the logic that their vulnerability made them less likely to insist on being treated better than google wanted to treat them. That seems really bad to me. If you're asking folks on the street and happen to get a lot of unhoused folks because they're around, that's fine. Writing memos telling people to target vulnerable populat…

You’re using words like “targeted” and “vulnerable” to imply there’s some kind of harm being done here, which is laughably false. Just because something strikes you as wrong (for whatever ridiculous reason) doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong, let alone “gross and deeply unethical.”

Are osteoporosis researchers unethical for “targeting” women?

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#99

Post by kapuasuite »

JohnFen wrote: post #48
TallGuyShort wrote: post #21

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, dam…

> I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. This is not a case of that. Google (or its contractor) could easily have done this in a way that was not objectionable. They simply decided not to.

What would make it “not objectionable?”

Re: Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

#100

Post by aantix »

tobib wrote: post #71
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.

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

Billions that participate are now considered "vulnerable"?
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