[bjornedstrom]

These kinds of issues are not unique to dark skin. Anecdote time: :-)

As a Swedish/Finnish man (and a somewhat stereotypical nerd at that), I'm paler than probably 95% of the world population.

Although facial recognition features (in the sense of trained AI models) often work fine on me given a good quality underlying photo, what often fails instead are preprocessing steps or color correction, especially in real-time systems. This can be the camera itself or software handling the image later.

For example if I'm in a Google Hangout in a normally lit room and then I move into slight sunlight or a lamp, my face will overexpose into a blob that looks like a low quality photo of the sun. It renders white, like #ffffff proper white. It's not actually overexposed at the hardware/camera level, but the software "corrects" it that way.

This typically never happens to other people.

[raxxorrax]

This is an awesome feature. Of your face, I mean, not of the recognition software.

At this points these complains are bullshit in my opinion. It shifts the debate about if we want to accept facial recognition to the side. It is like a free gift to those that sell these systems.

So if facial recognition is actually bad for minorities, people bringing up these topics should not be their friends. My opinion, I know it is a strong one, but it is also more correct.

Is a passport checker even needed for security would be a better discussion topic.

[jmkd]

While this may represent a failure of those systems to adequately cope with data outside of typical ranges, your anecdote is orthogonal to the notion that the system linked in this thread did not appear to place dark-skinned women firmly within those ranges, and thus represents a form of institutional bias, experienced as racism.

Your inconvenient experience differs at a material level, because as a white-skinned man, many other systems are optimised for you.