Face-Detection Cameras: Users' Racism Charges Explained (TIME)
When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.
then there is this:
just last month, a white employee at an RV dealership in Texas posted a YouTube video showing a black co-worker trying to get the built-in webcam on an HP Pavilion laptop to detect his face and track his movements. The camera zoomed in on the white employee and panned to follow her, but whenever the black employee came into the frame, the webcam stopped dead in its tracks. "I think my blackness is interfering with the computer's ability to follow me," the black employee jokingly concludes in the video. "Hewlett-Packard computers are racist."
reading the article it says that this is unintentional... its the result of taking the face recognition software and applying it to small, less efficient, and poorer quality web cameras and digital cameras.
Still I think its pretty funny and not at all surprising that the manufacturers didn't test this feature.
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