[krapp]

> That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it.

It can be both. An attitude that considers facial recognition software acceptable if it only recognizes light-skinned people is both lazy and racist. Only choosing to test on light-skinned people is racist because doing so assumes dark skinned people are an exception or an outlier, rather than an equally valid part of the set of "human faces."

[v_lisivka]

Whites have dark skin at the end of each summer.

[krapp]

True, but that doesn't really contradict the premise of my comment.

The assumption of ones own race being the default color for humans (rather than an arbitrary value) that leads to facial recognition software being trained on a data set so narrow that the resulting software can't even recognize skin colors that diverge from that norm is as much about implicit, albeit unintentional, racial bias as it is the particular technical problems involved and the need for engineers to cut costs and meet deadlines.

It's not entirely racist, but racism is a component.