Comments on: On HP’s Racist Webcams (Or Lack Thereof)

By: alfred liwanag, Jr.

alfred liwanag, Jr. — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 13:56:43 +0000

HP did end up looking into the matter. HP e-mailed a statement that acknowledged that the webcam “may have issues with contrast recognition in certain lighting situations”. There were tests conducted by various sites that indicated that given the appropriate lighting conditions, the webcam worked just fine. Racist HP Webcam: Tracks White People Only?

By: Gaudior

Gaudior — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:35:24 +0000

Both “prejudice” and “being privileged and not recognizing it,” are serious problems– and the differences between them are important to acknowledge because they need to be tackled in different ways. They’re related, come from some of the same sources, and have some of the same results, but I think that calling them the same thing oversimplifies the situation, and so makes it harder to come up with useful analyses.

By: Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:15:30 +0000

The question of whether it’s racism in the “result of institutional disparities of power and perceived worth” sense, not in the “malicious intentions” sense, seems to me to be solved by posing the question “had there been a similar problem in focussing on Northern-European-type skin in low light conditions, would it have been fixed?”

I’m betting it would have.

By: Maysie

Maysie — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 03:42:03 +0000

The article and the comments have been very interesting so far. And I wanted to add an observation that I had about something both odd and ironic about this fail.

In a world where Black folks and all darker-skinned folks are targeted as criminals and harassed and “racially profiled” (aka systemic racism, d’oh) isn’t it one of those moments of racism biting itself in its own butt when, through the magic of light-skinned privilege and the erasure of those with dark skin, that these same dark skinned people are NOT able to be targeted through software that doesn’t see them?

By: Lesley

Lesley — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:46:57 +0000

I’m really curious about this, and I’d love to see more video examples of this zoom system by other users. I used to own a webcam that supposedly had a face-tracking zoom ability, but I ended up returning it because it wouldn’t track my face either.

By: Jonquil

Jonquil — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:50:14 +0000

What you said, but also what your commenters said. Nobody at HP said “Our cameras shouldn’t show black people” instead, their subcontractor very likely didn’t think to test on anybody but white people. It wouldn’t shock me if the “standard algorithms” HP refers to were developed by CS grad students, who tested them on the people they knew and nobody else. In other words, privilege, unconscious privilege, and not thinking about nonwhite people because they didn’t *have* to think about nonwhite people.

It’s very much like the problem with black people being underrepresented in medical research, which means that the standard recommendations for e.g. high blood pressure are actually “standard white people” recommendations. That one, of course, is gravely complicated by people’s memories of Tuskeegee and their justified lack of trust of the medical establishment.

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 04:23:29 +0000

Software such as this is based on the concept of pattern recognition… Pattern recognition works by using contrast to identify objects (quick transition from a light pixel to a dark pixel usually means a border)…

If there isn’t enough contrast the software will have trouble identifying the object, in this case, the person’s face. This video is an example of a dark skinned person in low light conditions. This can also happen to a fair skinned person in a very brightly lit room with no exposure compensation.

This does not mean HP did not test this feature with dark skinned people… this does mean that the software probably worked fine in the well lit labs that most high tech companies have… but it failed in the real world…

By: The Angry Black Woman

The Angry Black Woman — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:19:52 +0000

What Nora said is what I was trying to get at over on the Alas thread before I had to go back to actually doing my job instead of messing around on blogs.

By: Tablesaw

Tablesaw — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:05:54 +0000

I think I’ve keyed into this because it’s an issue I’ve been wondering about for a few months now. I was particularly struck by Samuel R. Delaney saying that racism as a system “can be fueled by chance as much as by hostility or by the best of intentions.” And I’m also generally uncomfortable with “it wasn’t racist/sexist/transphobic, it was a mistake” defense, as though it can’t be both. (LJ’s recent mishandling of the gender field is an example of this.)

Like I said, I’ve been tentatively thinking about theory along these lines for a while (though I haven’t focused on it enough to go back to the library to find the book that I think might have some guidance). It seems to lead to unpredictable places theoretically, but also holds people (and non-person entities, in the case of coroporations and such) responsible for ending the system of racism more reliably.

I’ve been writing and deleting a lot on this comment, which is about where I am thinking about this. I have to go do seasonal shopping, but I’ll try to get back to the topic soon.

By: Mia

Mia — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:27:11 +0000

And regarding the actual topic of this post, I kind of think that the failings of Cyberlink and HP etc. are the result of a kind of privilege and institutional racism that made it possible to go through the whole development and testing process without considering (much less catching) the issue of darker skin tones.