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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

Is your criticism that these accusations are false, or just that they included too many true accusations in the same paragraph?

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My criticism is that including a laundry list of "isms" is a polarizing, low-effort rhetorical device that elides a lot of nuance.

White supremacy: darker skin tones tend to photograph worse than lighter skin tones. Laptop webcams are notoriously crappy and can make this effect worse. Is this white supremacy or physics? Can the test instructions be modified to ask all users to have an appropriate lighting setup (ie lit from above and from the side to ensure that your face is foregrounded properly)

Ableism: for users who require assistive technologies, is it better to take a test in their own space with their own equipment or to travel to a test center and use shared lab equipment? For users with mobility challenges, is it better to be in their own space or travel to a potentially non-accessible testing center?

Sexism: for working mothers, better to take a test in your own home or travel to a testing center and arrange for child care?

Two "isms" seem more relevant but weren’t mentioned: ageism - because fuck boomers, right? Socioeconomics - not everyone has access to a PC that meets the specifications or can acquire one on short notice.

Lots of context is discarded when one engages in polarizing categorical rhetoric. I’m not here shilling for proctoring software but rather for nuanced discourse.

> White supremacy: darker skin tones tend to photograph worse than lighter skin tones. Laptop webcams are notoriously crappy and can make this effect worse. Is this white supremacy or physics?

I’m not a photography expert, but it seems to me that cameras are physically equally capable of overexposing an image and underexposing an image. If a particular camera which is used in a facial monitoring system tends to do one rather than the other, I would ask why that is the case.

Doesn't work like that. Overexposing (with the same light) means having worse SNR due to higher gain.

The choice to use typically terrible cameras in a proctoring system disregarding that it might work ever worse than normally for a subset of people is suspect, yes.

But wouldn't it be just as easy to create a cheap camera that tends to correctly expose dark skin in normal lighting conditions, and cannot dial down exposure enough to prevent light skin from being blown out in normal lighting conditions? If that's possible but cheap cameras tend to not work this way, then why is that not the case?

Yes and no, but mostly no. Lighter skin reflects more light (which means more signal), so it's inherently easier to image (it would be harder in extremely intense light, but getting fast shutter speeds is a lot easier than dealing with not having enough photons). Auto-exposure algorithms tend to work more accurately on lighter skin, too, which could be improved but is generally not something implemented at the hardware level in a webcam as far as I know (software can ask for different iso sensibility and shutter speeds).

The "isms" referenced are less about the fact you can work around these complaints line by line and more about the fact no one bothered to check them before rolling out required surveillance technology for education.

White supremacy is not just bad faith things done by bad people, it is also the assumption that whiteness is the default experience and the failure to account for that not being the case. Similarly with ableism and sexism.

That being said, complaining about the accessibility & inclusiveness of our required surveillance technology does have a dystopian feel to it, lol.

> White supremacy is not just bad faith things done by bad people, it is also the assumption that whiteness is the default experience and the failure to account for that not being the case.

This only works with "new" definitions of racism. It is in fact plainly racist on it's face to demonize a group based on immutable characteristics. It is even worse when actual diversity of though is ignored and people of color are demonized because they don't agree with a race-marxist ideology.

I'm not sure I 100% understand what you are reacting to. I want to understand these two points a bit better:

  It is in fact plainly racist on it's face to demonize a group based on immutable characteristics.

Yes. Where have I, or the study's author, done this?

  It is even worse when actual diversity of though is ignored and people of color are demonized because they don't agree with a race-marxist ideology.

Yes. Where have I, or the study's author, done this?

Would these webcams have shipped if you couldn't see white faces well on them? I don't think they would, and the test proctors would not think of requiring one that didn't. Both the camera makers and the proctors are putting in an assumption that these products are only/primarily for white people, and thus discouraging non-white people is not an issue.

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