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Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for facial recognition

185 points by jamesgagan 7y ago

gerash 7y ago
This seems like a fake outrage to me. If I were a homeless I'd be more than happy for someone to take a photo of me for $5. In fact, I'd find it pretty hypocritical if someone was spending their energy fighting against possible infringement of my rights in such scenario instead of actually providing me with money or food.
- autoexec 7y ago
  > If I were a homeless I'd be more than happy for someone to take a photo of me for $5. The problem isn't that they were offering money in exchange for photos of homeless people it's that they were tricking homeless people into giving up their biometric data by telling them they'll pay them $5 just to play with a phone for a few minutes. If they were honest about what they were taking and why I wouldn't have a problem with it.
ehsankia 7y ago
At least the Verge has the less clickbait headline, mentioning that it was contractors. The original source mentions Google in the headline but the rest of articles only refers to Randstad. One part that is a bit confusing to me is, the original source makes no references whatsoever to any consent form. Usually you can't collect this sort of data without signed consent, and previous reports [0] do mention such a form. I know most people don't read the form, but I'm curious how you can get away with telling someone you're just playing a game and lie so much when the form should clearly state what you're collecting. Still, there should definitely be better vetting of contractors and stories like this definitely look very bad, even if the intentions were actually to help reduce ML bias. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/29/google-paid-for-face-scans-to-improve-pixel-4/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/29/google-paid-for-face-sca... EDIT: The original article does indeed mention an show a picture of the "agreement".
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  "I know most people don't read the form, but I'm curious how you can get away with telling someone you're just playing a game and lie so much when the form should clearly state what you're collecting." Mental illness, addiction, the constant 24/7 stress of being homeless, potentially systemtic issues starting from childhood that gets in the way of developing necessary reading skills to accurately analyze and knowledge base understanding of the concepts being read, etc. are all factors that would make reading and understanding any consent form of enough technological-legal terminology a very difficult task.
- journalctl 7y ago
  > ...I’m curious how you can get away with telling someone you’re just playing a game and lie so much... Since you’re curious: homeless people aren’t important to Google or society in general because they have so little and everyone has all but stopped caring about them. They’re poor, they’re unfortunate, and so they’re exploited. This has been happening since... leafs through book forever. Serfs used to toil away in fields until they perished, and nobody gave a damn about them either. They did this because they could get away with it, because they (and probably Google) knew there wouldn’t be any consequences. It’s the same old song and dance: the poor get explored for the benefit of the rich, and most people don’t seem to care.
  - swiley 7y ago
    I think they may have even been executed under older English common law.
- xenocyon 7y ago
  IMHO an entity is ethically responsible for anything its contractor does, unless there is reasonable clarity that the contractor acted in opposition to the client's wishes. Having someone else do your dirty work doesn't make it less dirty.
  - Analemma_ 7y ago
    Especially when more and more it seems like the main reason companies are using contractors is to launder responsibility for the shady things they do.
mgraczyk 7y ago
This strikes me as the ethically best possible way to collect this data. Google is paying people who need the money for something simple and completely harmless. The main counterargument appears to be that those who sold data "didn't understand what was going on". It's hard to imagine moral convictions in which someone could consistently argue that the homeless don't understand money in exchange for photos, but it's acceptable to leave them to fend for themselves on the street. Google is, at worst, helping people who need help.
- rmsaksida 7y ago
  > 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.
- moate 7y ago
  OOF. That's not how this works sir. Did you read the article? Some quotes: “They said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” the ex-staffer said. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.” Some were told to gather the face data by characterizing the scan as a “selfie game” similar to Snapchat, they said. One said workers were told to say things like, “Just play with the phone for a couple minutes and get a gift card,” and, “We have a new app, try it and get $5.” Google (or their contractor if you're going to fight about the semantics here) is, at worst, guilty of misleading people about what they were doing, targeting vulnerable people with the expressed idea that they would be less likely to create problems, and not actually improving anyone's conditions in a real way by doing this. Here's the moral convictions I have: lying to someone about what is happening to you in order to create a functioning business is bad business. It's entirely removed from the fact that small increments of money were given to some homeless people. I don't get to abuse homeless people as long as I give them 5 dollars afterwards. That's not how morality works. These people weren't lifted out of their conditions because of this life-changing sum. They weren't put into treatment centers or given job training. They were purposefully mislead and then compensated less than the price of a combo meal at McDonald's.
SamBam 7y ago
It sounds like there were three issues: 1. The contractor targeted homeless people 2. They targeted people with darker skin 3. They may not have been forthright or truthful about what they were doing. Number 3 is clearly wrong. But I think so long as the contractors were upfront and truthful about what they were doing, I don't know if 1 or 2 are problematic. The only argument I can see for why they shouldn't pay homeless people money for an easy job is that the prospect of money might be so enticing that they're willing to give up personal rights or freedoms (the same argument why we don't allow selling of organs). But $5 neither seems high enough, nor the process invasive enough, that this argument would hold water. As for ensuring that enough of a sample range is in the database as an attempt at avoiding data bias, this should be a no-brainer good thing.
- aeturnum 7y ago
  If this report is correct it seems like they were targeting a vulnerable population based on the logic that their vulnerability made them less likely to insist on being treated better than google wanted to treat them. That seems really bad to me. If you're asking folks on the street and happen to get a lot of unhoused folks because they're around, that's fine. Writing memos telling people to target vulnerable populations because they're vulnerable is gross and deeply unethical.
  - kapuasuite 7y ago
    You’re using words like “targeted” and “vulnerable” to imply there’s some kind of harm being done here, which is laughably false. Just because something strikes you as wrong (for whatever ridiculous reason) doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong, let alone “gross and deeply unethical.” Are osteoporosis researchers unethical for “targeting” women?
    - aeturnum 7y ago
      The word "targeted" appears in the document quoted in the article. I think describing the homeless as a vulnerable population is a pretty uncontroversial thing to say, but if you'd like I can only use language from the article. It's gross and deeply unethical to "target" homeless because they "didn’t know what was going on at all." Giving your subjects or customers incomplete information, such as "characterizing the scan as a 'selfie game'," is also clearly unethical.
kauffj 7y ago
Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objectionable. The fact that many will object is a phenomenon I've seen called "Copenhagen Ethics": https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...
- chooseaname 7y ago
  Giving $5 to a homeless person doesn't help them.
- blub 7y ago
  $5 isn't much. Why not post here a picture and 3d scan of your face as a token of good will? It could help some start-ups that need such a face for demo purposes or other experiments.
  - username90 7y ago
    Giving up your HN privacy is different than selling a scan of your face that anyone can already find with a simple Google search on Facebook or Linkedin.
  - matz1 7y ago
    I think most people, Including me, trust google/fb more than random people on hn.
- tobib 7y ago
  > I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. Would you really? My gut feeling tells me that's not the case for most people for privacy or ethical reasons. Just because those people are poor, we expect them to have lower privacy or ethical standards. The link you posted has the following example, I think you're referring to that > BBH Labs was an exception – they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations. That's completely different. Offering Wifi has zero long term effects. It's providing people with a "business opportunity" that wouldn't have access to it otherwise. Giving someone 5 bucks for their face picture (or other biometrics) is totally different and has long term negative effects.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
There's a long, long history of leaving women, people of color, poor people and other groups out of data sets. For example, I've read articles that indicate we can't create good photos of people of color because film standards were normalized to white skin. So, try to fix that and... there's hell to pay? File under: "No good deed goes unpunished."
- mattnewton 7y ago
  I don't think there is anything wrong with the memo saying "we need more people of color in our data set." I hope everyone agrees with that. What seems to have been bad is the contractor misinforming people about what data would be collected (and for what use), and it's not clear what Google had in their contract to prevent that kind of unethical behavior. It is also very questionable IMO to target the homeless "because they won't talk to the media" which was allegedly in the instructions the contracting firm Randstad gave to it's workers. Disclaimer: While I work as a low level employee at an unrelated team in Google, my opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer, and this is the first I am hearing of this.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    It also seems bad to Target the homeless "because they won't talk to the media" or whatever the quote was. To me, this just parses as "We have some new Politically Correct excuse to exclude poor people from our dataset." Being so unimportant that the world wants you to remain invisible isn't generally a good thing. There is always some excuse. There is no condition under which it is sufficiently respectful, politely handled, blah blah blah to be A Good Idea.
- umvi 7y ago
  It's not an easy problem as you imply. It's not that you are "leaving out" groups so much that you have to go out of your way to include minorities in your data set by the definition of the word minority. This can make your project magnitudes more complex. No matter what you make, some minority corner case will break your tech and generate outrage. ("How DARE your speech recognition not work on AAVE!", "How DARE your facial recognition not work on burn center victims!" etc.)
rootsudo 7y ago
Same thing panasonic does in Japan to improve facial recognition - except they just pay foreigners 5000 JPY and tell you what they do.
acdc4life 7y ago
Why doesn’t the model trained on one race generalize to different races? That sounds inferior to human vision.
- rcar 7y ago
  Facial features can vary from ethnicity to ethnicity (see e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074358/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074358/), and so a machine learning model trained solely on pictures from one ethnic group may not understand how to reliably distinguish different people of another ethnicity.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  "All X's look the same" where X is any of [Asians, Black people, white people, etc..] is a very common refrain. Human eyes also need to be trained on diverse data. It's the cross-race effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect
  - acdc4life 7y ago
    The wiki post mentioned that people are right 45% of the time. How does dl and ml stack up? Also not mentioned, how long does it take for humans to start recognizing new races, vs ml and dl?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
curiousgal 7y ago
How dare they give $5 to homeless people instead of college students walking around campus with airpods.
- journalctl 7y ago
  Yeah, usually you have to pay at least minimum wage to exploit college students.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
A while ago Google got bad press because some image-tagging service identified some people as "gorillas", and IIRC it was blamed on not having enough diversity of skin color in the training data. So... it sounds like at least the "instructed them to target people of color" part of this is them trying to correct that. But in isolation that sounds even worse than the first instance. I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. This is not a case of that. Google (or its contractor) could easily have done this in a way that was not objectionable. They simply decided not to.
  - kapuasuite 7y ago
    What would make it “not objectionable?”
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      For starters, telling the people what you're actually doing and maybe paying them more than 5 bucks.
      - kapuasuite 7y ago
        You can argue that lying would be objectionable, but we’re talking about something with essentially no consequences here. As for the fee, how much are their faces worth beyond a fee they were obviously already willing to accept?
        autoexec 7y ago
        > but we’re talking about something with essentially no consequences here. Just because it's difficult to identify the harms caused by someone stealing your biometric data that doesn't mean there are no harms. Gaining access to someone's biometric data clearly opens them up to certain types of risks ranging from identify theft to surveillance. Fraudulently gaining access to someone's biometric data is wrong even if the data is never abused or exploited.
username90 7y ago
I remember the outrage when people discovered that Google's AI wasn't properly trained on black faces. It makes sense that they try hard to avoid that happening again by paying black people to let Google scan their faces. It is not unethical to try to diversify your training data. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11710136/Google-Photos-assigns-gorilla-tag-to-photos-of-black-people.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11710136/Googl... Anyway, this part sounds directly illegal, seems like it was just Randstad being greedy but if anyone from Google knew about it then it is bad but I doubt that they couldn't budget enough money to get the scans legally: > They said Randstad project leaders specifically told the TVCs to (...) conceal the fact that people’s faces were being recorded and even lie to maximize their data collections. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-google-darker-skin-tones-facial-recognition-pixel-20191002-5vxpgowknffnvbmy5eg7epsf34-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-google-darker-s...
- dclusin 7y ago
  I feel like they were needlessly dishonest and misleading and that being truthful would have gotten more people on board. Saying something along the lines of "hey, we noticed our facial recognition algorithms don't work so well for African Americans. Could you help us fix that by letting us take a picture of your face? We'll give you a $5 gift card for your troubles."
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    That seems pretty clear. Verge title is kind of clickbait by using `Google Contractors` rather than `Randstad` though. The "and/or" in "it sounds like Google and/or its contractor may have been taking some extreme and unsavory shortcuts to cash in." is clearly use of weasel words, the journalist was unable to substantiate the allegation that Google was aware of this unethical practice. Sloppy reporting demonstrating a lack of journalistic integrity.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      That's still much better than the original source (NY Daily Times) which literally just says "Google".
olalonde 7y ago
Anyone knows why they were giving gift cards instead of cash? I suppose there's a legal reason.
- Notorious_BLT 7y ago
  I can think of several reasons that homeless activism groups would suggest as reasons to use gift cards instead of cash. Most of them are pretty evident if you consider what kinds of goods are only available through cash-only purchases.
andrerm 7y ago
> “They [Google contractor] said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” the ex-staffer said. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.”
microtherion 7y ago
Life imitates video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6TuxmgJN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6TuxmgJN0
kpx11 7y ago
Next news: Google engineer sneezes in subway, google trying to infect people. I mean there's no need to have google's name in there, other than to click-bait-trick people into viewing their subpar journalism with ads. But, It's kinda shitty to cheat people no matter what. You cannot say hey pixel 4 is gonna have face unlock and i want you face scanned for that obviously, but contractor should have done a better job.
willwashburn 7y ago
The first thing they teach you about research, do not do it on the vulnerable population. It's not like people going to the public would matter; The Pixel 4's features and hardware all leaked way before the announcement.
sarcasmatwork 7y ago
Selling ones privacy for a $5 Starbucks G/C. They know their gullible audience!
jdkee 7y ago
Google seems to be outsourcing their ethics.
l_t 7y ago
> Google and Randstad didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment. The content of the article is interesting enough, but this line at the end caught my attention. Is it reasonable to expect someone to "immediately reply" before you publish the article? Because that doesn't sound like ethical journalism to me, unless I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "immediately" in this context.
- ry_ry 7y ago
  Doesn't matter, I suspect - It works within the narrative and implies they have something to hide. It's good /tabloid/ journalism, and poor investigative journalism. Randstad are very much the former.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    Historically if you wait multiple days / weeks to give them a chance to reply they just do an end-run and publish puff pieces in major outlets to try and defuse your article. There are multiple cases of this in the past year. It's either investigative journalism or it's not. How long you wait for comment has nothing to do with that. Do you really think this is equivalent to tabloids posting faked photos of some movie star's belly?
    - gruez 7y ago
      >There are multiple cases of this in the past year. Would you care to list some examples? I can't think of any.
    - ry_ry 7y ago
      That's a disingenuous comparison. How long did they wait before publishing? We don't know, it doesn't matter. Simply stating that they didn't respond had the desired effect, and - as you rightly pointed out - does nothing to diffuse the story. The implication of the story being that not only are Google potentially taking advantage of vulnerable people to further their unspoken, morally grey agenda, but it may also have a racially questionable angle. Alternately, they wanted to train their facial recognition dataset with certain characteristics on the cheap. That in itself is interesting, but probably wouldn't get as many clicks. It's bottom drawer "I leave you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions" stuff.
kapuasuite 7y ago
This really counts as “extreme and unsavory” these days?
NN88 7y ago
This is blatantly unethical. Expanding your database? Great Forgetting situational ethics? Disgusting
jonas_kgomo 7y ago
This is too desperate. It seems AI will help in criminalizing and unbiased profiling of people of color, as a person of color it feels really hard to imagine a future where justice is done with due diligence. Joy at Media Lab has been looking at this issue for a while and advocating for balance. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612775/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612775/algorithms-crimina... Also I find it weird that Nvidia was able to simulate realisticly looking people last year, and Google is struggling to find humans, can't they use that as ground-truth?

185 points by jamesgagan 7y ago

This seems like a fake outrage to me. If I were a homeless I'd be more than happy for someone to take a photo of me for $5. In fact, I'd find it pretty hypocritical if someone was spending their energy fighting against possible infringement of my rights in such scenario instead of actually providing me with money or food.

autoexec 7y ago
> If I were a homeless I'd be more than happy for someone to take a photo of me for $5. The problem isn't that they were offering money in exchange for photos of homeless people it's that they were tricking homeless people into giving up their biometric data by telling them they'll pay them $5 just to play with a phone for a few minutes. If they were honest about what they were taking and why I wouldn't have a problem with it.

ehsankia 7y ago

At least the Verge has the less clickbait headline, mentioning that it was contractors. The original source mentions Google in the headline but the rest of articles only refers to Randstad. One part that is a bit confusing to me is, the original source makes no references whatsoever to any consent form. Usually you can't collect this sort of data without signed consent, and previous reports [0] do mention such a form. I know most people don't read the form, but I'm curious how you can get away with telling someone you're just playing a game and lie so much when the form should clearly state what you're collecting. Still, there should definitely be better vetting of contractors and stories like this definitely look very bad, even if the intentions were actually to help reduce ML bias. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/29/google-paid-for-face-scans-to-improve-pixel-4/ https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/29/google-paid-for-face-sca... EDIT: The original article does indeed mention an show a picture of the "agreement".

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
"I know most people don't read the form, but I'm curious how you can get away with telling someone you're just playing a game and lie so much when the form should clearly state what you're collecting." Mental illness, addiction, the constant 24/7 stress of being homeless, potentially systemtic issues starting from childhood that gets in the way of developing necessary reading skills to accurately analyze and knowledge base understanding of the concepts being read, etc. are all factors that would make reading and understanding any consent form of enough technological-legal terminology a very difficult task.
journalctl 7y ago
> ...I’m curious how you can get away with telling someone you’re just playing a game and lie so much... Since you’re curious: homeless people aren’t important to Google or society in general because they have so little and everyone has all but stopped caring about them. They’re poor, they’re unfortunate, and so they’re exploited. This has been happening since... leafs through book forever. Serfs used to toil away in fields until they perished, and nobody gave a damn about them either. They did this because they could get away with it, because they (and probably Google) knew there wouldn’t be any consequences. It’s the same old song and dance: the poor get explored for the benefit of the rich, and most people don’t seem to care.
- swiley 7y ago
  I think they may have even been executed under older English common law.
xenocyon 7y ago
IMHO an entity is ethically responsible for anything its contractor does, unless there is reasonable clarity that the contractor acted in opposition to the client's wishes. Having someone else do your dirty work doesn't make it less dirty.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  Especially when more and more it seems like the main reason companies are using contractors is to launder responsibility for the shady things they do.

mgraczyk 7y ago

This strikes me as the ethically best possible way to collect this data. Google is paying people who need the money for something simple and completely harmless. The main counterargument appears to be that those who sold data "didn't understand what was going on". It's hard to imagine moral convictions in which someone could consistently argue that the homeless don't understand money in exchange for photos, but it's acceptable to leave them to fend for themselves on the street. Google is, at worst, helping people who need help.

rmsaksida 7y ago
> 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.
moate 7y ago
OOF. That's not how this works sir. Did you read the article? Some quotes: “They said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” the ex-staffer said. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.” Some were told to gather the face data by characterizing the scan as a “selfie game” similar to Snapchat, they said. One said workers were told to say things like, “Just play with the phone for a couple minutes and get a gift card,” and, “We have a new app, try it and get $5.” Google (or their contractor if you're going to fight about the semantics here) is, at worst, guilty of misleading people about what they were doing, targeting vulnerable people with the expressed idea that they would be less likely to create problems, and not actually improving anyone's conditions in a real way by doing this. Here's the moral convictions I have: lying to someone about what is happening to you in order to create a functioning business is bad business. It's entirely removed from the fact that small increments of money were given to some homeless people. I don't get to abuse homeless people as long as I give them 5 dollars afterwards. That's not how morality works. These people weren't lifted out of their conditions because of this life-changing sum. They weren't put into treatment centers or given job training. They were purposefully mislead and then compensated less than the price of a combo meal at McDonald's.

SamBam 7y ago

It sounds like there were three issues: 1. The contractor targeted homeless people 2. They targeted people with darker skin 3. They may not have been forthright or truthful about what they were doing. Number 3 is clearly wrong. But I think so long as the contractors were upfront and truthful about what they were doing, I don't know if 1 or 2 are problematic. The only argument I can see for why they shouldn't pay homeless people money for an easy job is that the prospect of money might be so enticing that they're willing to give up personal rights or freedoms (the same argument why we don't allow selling of organs). But $5 neither seems high enough, nor the process invasive enough, that this argument would hold water. As for ensuring that enough of a sample range is in the database as an attempt at avoiding data bias, this should be a no-brainer good thing.

aeturnum 7y ago
If this report is correct it seems like they were targeting a vulnerable population based on the logic that their vulnerability made them less likely to insist on being treated better than google wanted to treat them. That seems really bad to me. If you're asking folks on the street and happen to get a lot of unhoused folks because they're around, that's fine. Writing memos telling people to target vulnerable populations because they're vulnerable is gross and deeply unethical.
- kapuasuite 7y ago
  You’re using words like “targeted” and “vulnerable” to imply there’s some kind of harm being done here, which is laughably false. Just because something strikes you as wrong (for whatever ridiculous reason) doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong, let alone “gross and deeply unethical.” Are osteoporosis researchers unethical for “targeting” women?
  - aeturnum 7y ago
    The word "targeted" appears in the document quoted in the article. I think describing the homeless as a vulnerable population is a pretty uncontroversial thing to say, but if you'd like I can only use language from the article. It's gross and deeply unethical to "target" homeless because they "didn’t know what was going on at all." Giving your subjects or customers incomplete information, such as "characterizing the scan as a 'selfie game'," is also clearly unethical.

kauffj 7y ago

Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objectionable. The fact that many will object is a phenomenon I've seen called "Copenhagen Ethics": https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

chooseaname 7y ago
Giving $5 to a homeless person doesn't help them.
blub 7y ago
$5 isn't much. Why not post here a picture and 3d scan of your face as a token of good will? It could help some start-ups that need such a face for demo purposes or other experiments.
- username90 7y ago
  Giving up your HN privacy is different than selling a scan of your face that anyone can already find with a simple Google search on Facebook or Linkedin.
- matz1 7y ago
  I think most people, Including me, trust google/fb more than random people on hn.
tobib 7y ago
> I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. Would you really? My gut feeling tells me that's not the case for most people for privacy or ethical reasons. Just because those people are poor, we expect them to have lower privacy or ethical standards. The link you posted has the following example, I think you're referring to that > BBH Labs was an exception – they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations. That's completely different. Offering Wifi has zero long term effects. It's providing people with a "business opportunity" that wouldn't have access to it otherwise. Giving someone 5 bucks for their face picture (or other biometrics) is totally different and has long term negative effects.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

There's a long, long history of leaving women, people of color, poor people and other groups out of data sets. For example, I've read articles that indicate we can't create good photos of people of color because film standards were normalized to white skin. So, try to fix that and... there's hell to pay? File under: "No good deed goes unpunished."

mattnewton 7y ago
I don't think there is anything wrong with the memo saying "we need more people of color in our data set." I hope everyone agrees with that. What seems to have been bad is the contractor misinforming people about what data would be collected (and for what use), and it's not clear what Google had in their contract to prevent that kind of unethical behavior. It is also very questionable IMO to target the homeless "because they won't talk to the media" which was allegedly in the instructions the contracting firm Randstad gave to it's workers. Disclaimer: While I work as a low level employee at an unrelated team in Google, my opinions are my own and do not represent those of my employer, and this is the first I am hearing of this.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  It also seems bad to Target the homeless "because they won't talk to the media" or whatever the quote was. To me, this just parses as "We have some new Politically Correct excuse to exclude poor people from our dataset." Being so unimportant that the world wants you to remain invisible isn't generally a good thing. There is always some excuse. There is no condition under which it is sufficiently respectful, politely handled, blah blah blah to be A Good Idea.
umvi 7y ago
It's not an easy problem as you imply. It's not that you are "leaving out" groups so much that you have to go out of your way to include minorities in your data set by the definition of the word minority. This can make your project magnitudes more complex. No matter what you make, some minority corner case will break your tech and generate outrage. ("How DARE your speech recognition not work on AAVE!", "How DARE your facial recognition not work on burn center victims!" etc.)

rootsudo 7y ago

Same thing panasonic does in Japan to improve facial recognition - except they just pay foreigners 5000 JPY and tell you what they do.

acdc4life 7y ago

Why doesn’t the model trained on one race generalize to different races? That sounds inferior to human vision.

rcar 7y ago
Facial features can vary from ethnicity to ethnicity (see e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074358/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3074358/), and so a machine learning model trained solely on pictures from one ethnic group may not understand how to reliably distinguish different people of another ethnicity.
kllrnohj 7y ago
"All X's look the same" where X is any of [Asians, Black people, white people, etc..] is a very common refrain. Human eyes also need to be trained on diverse data. It's the cross-race effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_effect
- acdc4life 7y ago
  The wiki post mentioned that people are right 45% of the time. How does dl and ml stack up? Also not mentioned, how long does it take for humans to start recognizing new races, vs ml and dl?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

curiousgal 7y ago

How dare they give $5 to homeless people instead of college students walking around campus with airpods.

journalctl 7y ago
Yeah, usually you have to pay at least minimum wage to exploit college students.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

A while ago Google got bad press because some image-tagging service identified some people as "gorillas", and IIRC it was blamed on not having enough diversity of skin color in the training data. So... it sounds like at least the "instructed them to target people of color" part of this is them trying to correct that. But in isolation that sounds even worse than the first instance. I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

JohnFen 7y ago
> I guess you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. This is not a case of that. Google (or its contractor) could easily have done this in a way that was not objectionable. They simply decided not to.
- kapuasuite 7y ago
  What would make it “not objectionable?”
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    For starters, telling the people what you're actually doing and maybe paying them more than 5 bucks.
    - kapuasuite 7y ago
      You can argue that lying would be objectionable, but we’re talking about something with essentially no consequences here. As for the fee, how much are their faces worth beyond a fee they were obviously already willing to accept?
      - autoexec 7y ago
        > but we’re talking about something with essentially no consequences here. Just because it's difficult to identify the harms caused by someone stealing your biometric data that doesn't mean there are no harms. Gaining access to someone's biometric data clearly opens them up to certain types of risks ranging from identify theft to surveillance. Fraudulently gaining access to someone's biometric data is wrong even if the data is never abused or exploited.

username90 7y ago

I remember the outrage when people discovered that Google's AI wasn't properly trained on black faces. It makes sense that they try hard to avoid that happening again by paying black people to let Google scan their faces. It is not unethical to try to diversify your training data. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11710136/Google-Photos-assigns-gorilla-tag-to-photos-of-black-people.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/11710136/Googl... Anyway, this part sounds directly illegal, seems like it was just Randstad being greedy but if anyone from Google knew about it then it is bad but I doubt that they couldn't budget enough money to get the scans legally: > They said Randstad project leaders specifically told the TVCs to (...) conceal the fact that people’s faces were being recorded and even lie to maximize their data collections. https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-google-darker-skin-tones-facial-recognition-pixel-20191002-5vxpgowknffnvbmy5eg7epsf34-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-google-darker-s...

dclusin 7y ago
I feel like they were needlessly dishonest and misleading and that being truthful would have gotten more people on board. Saying something along the lines of "hey, we noticed our facial recognition algorithms don't work so well for African Americans. Could you help us fix that by letting us take a picture of your face? We'll give you a $5 gift card for your troubles."
- cwkoss 7y ago
  That seems pretty clear. Verge title is kind of clickbait by using `Google Contractors` rather than `Randstad` though. The "and/or" in "it sounds like Google and/or its contractor may have been taking some extreme and unsavory shortcuts to cash in." is clearly use of weasel words, the journalist was unable to substantiate the allegation that Google was aware of this unethical practice. Sloppy reporting demonstrating a lack of journalistic integrity.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    That's still much better than the original source (NY Daily Times) which literally just says "Google".

olalonde 7y ago

Anyone knows why they were giving gift cards instead of cash? I suppose there's a legal reason.

Notorious_BLT 7y ago
I can think of several reasons that homeless activism groups would suggest as reasons to use gift cards instead of cash. Most of them are pretty evident if you consider what kinds of goods are only available through cash-only purchases.

andrerm 7y ago

> “They [Google contractor] said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” the ex-staffer said. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.”

microtherion 7y ago

Life imitates video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6TuxmgJN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ6TuxmgJN0

kpx11 7y ago

Next news: Google engineer sneezes in subway, google trying to infect people. I mean there's no need to have google's name in there, other than to click-bait-trick people into viewing their subpar journalism with ads. But, It's kinda shitty to cheat people no matter what. You cannot say hey pixel 4 is gonna have face unlock and i want you face scanned for that obviously, but contractor should have done a better job.

willwashburn 7y ago

The first thing they teach you about research, do not do it on the vulnerable population. It's not like people going to the public would matter; The Pixel 4's features and hardware all leaked way before the announcement.

sarcasmatwork 7y ago

Selling ones privacy for a $5 Starbucks G/C. They know their gullible audience!

jdkee 7y ago

Google seems to be outsourcing their ethics.

l_t 7y ago

> Google and Randstad didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment. The content of the article is interesting enough, but this line at the end caught my attention. Is it reasonable to expect someone to "immediately reply" before you publish the article? Because that doesn't sound like ethical journalism to me, unless I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "immediately" in this context.

ry_ry 7y ago
Doesn't matter, I suspect - It works within the narrative and implies they have something to hide. It's good /tabloid/ journalism, and poor investigative journalism. Randstad are very much the former.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Historically if you wait multiple days / weeks to give them a chance to reply they just do an end-run and publish puff pieces in major outlets to try and defuse your article. There are multiple cases of this in the past year. It's either investigative journalism or it's not. How long you wait for comment has nothing to do with that. Do you really think this is equivalent to tabloids posting faked photos of some movie star's belly?
  - gruez 7y ago
    >There are multiple cases of this in the past year. Would you care to list some examples? I can't think of any.
  - ry_ry 7y ago
    That's a disingenuous comparison. How long did they wait before publishing? We don't know, it doesn't matter. Simply stating that they didn't respond had the desired effect, and - as you rightly pointed out - does nothing to diffuse the story. The implication of the story being that not only are Google potentially taking advantage of vulnerable people to further their unspoken, morally grey agenda, but it may also have a racially questionable angle. Alternately, they wanted to train their facial recognition dataset with certain characteristics on the cheap. That in itself is interesting, but probably wouldn't get as many clicks. It's bottom drawer "I leave you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions" stuff.

kapuasuite 7y ago

This really counts as “extreme and unsavory” these days?

NN88 7y ago

This is blatantly unethical. Expanding your database? Great Forgetting situational ethics? Disgusting

jonas_kgomo 7y ago

This is too desperate. It seems AI will help in criminalizing and unbiased profiling of people of color, as a person of color it feels really hard to imagine a future where justice is done with due diligence. Joy at Media Lab has been looking at this issue for a while and advocating for balance. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612775/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612775/algorithms-crimina... Also I find it weird that Nvidia was able to simulate realisticly looking people last year, and Google is struggling to find humans, can't they use that as ground-truth?