[rmsaksida]

> This strikes me as the ethically best possible way to collect this data

"a contracting agency named Randstad sent teams to Atlanta explicitly to target homeless people and those with dark skin, often without saying they were working for Google, and without letting on that they were actually recording people’s faces"

How can this be the most ethical way to collect data?

The problem isn't in acquiring facial recognition data from homeless people, but in mischaracterising the nature of the experiment when doing so. If the reporting is accurate, they lied to vulnerable people and tricked them into selling their data for cheap.

Companies can't go around hustling people into giving away their private information. It doesn't matter if you think this is "for their own good", a homeless person may want to refuse being catalogued by Google for a variety of reasons.