Black Uber Eats driver banned after "continued mismatches" by facial-recognition

bbc.com

6 points·whycome··6 comments

Specific issue aside, one thing I find so frustrating is that it’s basically impossible to contact big tech. He had to sue for this to get resolved. I get that AI and heavily automated processes are always going to be a thing with platforms with so many users, but there needs to be a way to speak to a real human who is empowered to fix issues when things aren’t working.

This is especially bad in Ubers case given the extortionate service charge that they add. It’s not like it’s an ad supported free user that brings hardly any revenue.

> But the Microsoft-powered Uber Eats app increased these verification checks.

"Microsoft-powered" is doing a lot of work in that sentence

As a white guy I have trouble in the tropical sun, so, I use sunscreen.

Maybe we should make sure phones have alternative biometric functionality for black people such as fingerprints.

But this is clerly a bug in the app or the training set. I can't imagine a reason that makes it impossible to fix it.

Darker skin in light background, poor dynamic range in purely optical facial recognition system.

Geting a nice image for a video call is difficult. Try to avoid a window in a sunny day in the background. Try not to get a lamp behind you in the image. ... Perhaps the app also needs some instructions when the ilumination is bad, independently of the skin tone.

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