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Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

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/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-s...

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Randstad is dishonest in general.

A friend went through the application and they wanted her to digitally sign 46 contracts, one after the other, without a chance to read the following contract before signing the current one. Including one about an arbitration clause. She did see that the first contract offered to send the rest of the contracts printed, by mail, but when she talked to the rep, he acted like he didn't have access to the contracts he wanted her to sign (yeah right and later he'll be like, well you signed y, so you gave up the right to x, probably knows them by heart), and that she should simply sign them and then go back and print them.

Presumably they have to offer to send them by mail for the contract based on online signatures to be binding, so it's interesting that the rep refused to do so. It was especially sad they have a deal with unemployment offices that funnel workers to them using state funds.

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."

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.

That's still much better than the original source (NY Daily Times) which literally just says "Google".

Outsourcing work is not a justification for outsource responsibility. Google has a choice.

That's why it would have been great if the Verge did some journalism so we actually had some clarity on the situation.

There is a premise in this deduction, which Randstad made: 1. We need darker faces in our training data. 2. Therefore, gather training data from homeless people.

How do you go from 1 to 2? With the premise "darker-faced people tend to be homeless".

This is not necessarily a false premise -- statistically, it is true, and it is a reflection of systemic injustice -- but the outrage is not whether it's true or false; the outrage is that Randstad exploited this painful fact.

In the article it said Randstad targeted homeless people because they were less likely to talk to the media.

Also I'm assuming homeless people would be much happier about a 5$ gift card on average.

That's wrong. The assumption would be that homeless people tend to be dark faced.

It's so unsupported, of course. Far more likely that homeless people tend to be a available and amenable to the project.

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