By Richard Lawler, Engadget
This summer, we learned that Google had embarked on a wide scale project to collect facial recognition data, which the company said was necessary to build "fairness" into face unlocking for its Pixel 4, which will be officially unveiled on October 15th. A new report from the New York Daily News
has more details on where Google sent people to collect that data, and
what they were told to do by the company that hired them as contractors
for the project.
The people collecting the data worked as TVCs -- the "temporary,
vendor and contractors" who outnumber Google's own employees on the
company's roster -- for an employment firm called Randstad. While the
statement Google gave to media this summer indicated that participants
signed a consent form allowing for the use of their data, including
everything from infrared response to how they picked up the phone from
the table, temp workers the paper talked to said they were trained to be
pushy, and even lie to people about what was going on.
Google told the News that
it was investigating claims that "dubious" tactics were used, as the
reporters cited several people who said they participated without any
clear idea of what was going on or who the data was for. According to
the contractors cited, they had a mandate to pursue "darker skin tones,"
which included pushes to collect scans from homeless people and college
students -- the former because they'd be less likely to talk to the
media, and all of them because they'd be willing to do it in exchange
for $5 Starbucks gift cards.
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