Google: Practical, Pragmatic, and Logical
October 3, 2019
I am not sure if this news item about the GOOG is accurate. Nevertheless, it does provide a Googley solution to a thorny problem; namely, where can one get images with which to train a facial recognition system.
One could scrape Ancestry.com. One could scrape Yandex Images. One could retain the enterprising Yahoo engineer who hacked accounts for interesting images.
Or
One could snap pix of homeless people. Atlanta. Hmmm. Atlanta?
The allegedly accurate factoids appear in “Google Contractors Reportedly Targeted Homeless People for Pixel 4 Facial Recognition.” I noted:
a Google contractor may be using some questionable methods to get those facial scans, including targeting groups of homeless people and tricking college students who didn’t know they were being recorded. According to several sources who allegedly worked on the project, 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.
Legal? Illegal? I don’t care.
The idea and the execution is troubling.
If true, classy. Like the yacht death involving drugs and an alleged person for hire. Somehow Googley.
Stephen E Arnold, October 3, 2019
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