Monday, December 28, 2009

HP: Hatred and Prejudice?

A video demonstrating that face recognition cameras installed in HP laptops cannot detect black faces has had over one million views on YouTube.

The short movie, uploaded earlier this month, features "Black Desi" and his colleague "White Wanda". When Wanda, a white woman, is in front of the screen, the camera zooms to her face and moves as she moves. But when Desi, a black man, does the same, the camera does not respond by tracking him.

The clip is titled "HP computers are racist". According to an HP spokesman, "HP has been informed of a potential issue with the facial-tracking software included on some of its systems, which appears to occur when insufficient foreground lighting is available." Hmmm . . . so wouldn't this have come up during testing of the software? Or didn't HP bother to test their facial recognition software with African Americans . . . for some reason?



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