I'm not being racist...
...but they all look the same to me.
I have a slight form of Face Blindness. I have to study someone's overall features (clothes, a scar, hair type, mannerisms, size of ears, voice etc) to help me recognise people. I need to get a handle on someone and I suspect many other people have similar problems, whether they know it or not.
I have more problems with a woman's face partly I feel because so many have make up on which smooths out features. Chubby faced people have skin pulled a little tighter which removes wrinkles. I'm white and black people tend to look younger to me, their faces often look smoother and more round and I've thought this may be to do with darker skin not showing shadows so much on the face.
Is the lack of contrast from light to dark on their faces a valid reason I wonder? Do they have less wrinkles? I think I can think of a few other reasons computers would struggle rather than racism.
Another may simply be that most of the programmers working on these products are white men who when teaching a computer what to look for are using their own "white man's" algorithm in their brains to recognise friend or foe. The area's I have lived in, rural England, simply haven't had many black people in for me to identify them as well as white...perhaps computer geeks who have spent most of their lives in darkened rooms surrounded by other white people and computers in just don't know what the black peoples little differences are.
No, I'm not sold on the racism card within face id.
You strip the hair and makeup off of anyone and I wonder how accurate a human would be at spotting gender. I'm willing to bet your own accuracy would change between different races and colours.
Also, go find a group of black programmers who have made a face ID software and test their results.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
