Facial recognition database used by FBI is out of control
> Database contains photos of half of US adults without consent, and algorithm is wrong nearly 15% of time and is more likely to misidentify black people<p>I think technology is often a very effective way to describe what "systemic racism" is.<p>Racism propagates easily, and race-blind / race-agnostic / race-indifferent behavior does not combat it or counteract it.<p>Imagine a majority-white tech team, largely color-blind, yet still (by virtue of economic and geographic segregation) in a mostly white-centric bubble. The training set might be largely white. If some preprocessing or feature-detection is taking place on the raw images, it might be tracking features that could have higher variability among white people while overlooking other features.<p>If you don't know to go out of your way to check for, include tests, and give thought to mitigating imbalances caused by race (because you "see no race") then you allow this problem to propagate. In the case of computer vision, you will inherit the "racism" of every library you import from.<p>This reminds me of gender biased found in Word2vec[1]. It is hard to accuse the dataset of being sexist, especially when viewing it as a reflection of language in news article. Yet, people using Word2vec use it as a representative of language, not a representative of language in news, with all the baggage in today's (and past) culture. As a result, sexism can propagate, autocomplete and query suggestions might be biased. Then spending habits might be biased, etc.<p><pre><code>  [1]: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/</code></pre>