Google recently cancelled what it called a “field research” program which offered various subjects in American cities $5 in gift card form to scan their face. The Google face scanning was the subject of a New York Daily News article that reported Google’s contracting agency actively targeted homeless in Atlanta for the research.
According to their report, the agency also tricked college students into participating under the guise that they’d just “be testing a new app.”
If my talking about this is beginning to sound like my colleague Craig — who would be very much against Google face scanning based on his prior blogs — it’s because I’m taking his side on this issue.
Both the homeless and college students alike (but especially the homeless) have enough to worry about without some large corporation nabbing data about their face. Also… Really, $5? You couldn’t do better, Google?
So where did the lie occur?
What was the point of this exercise-gone-wrong?
Originally, the company told us, the idea was to make sure the [newly launched] Pixel 4’s new Face Unlock feature would recognize a diverse array of faces, which could keep it from being biased against people of color — a legitimate concern for facial recognition tech.
Google told The Verge that the program was suspended following the Daily News‘ story and that the story’s details were “very disturbing.”
Google stressed that they had told their contractor to be transparent about what the scanning was for.
Related: Don’t Be Like Mark Zuckerberg: Data Privacy Tips for AV Integrators
“We’re taking these claims seriously and investigating them. The allegations regarding truthfulness and consent are in violation of our requirements for volunteer research studies and the training that we provided,” the company said in a statement.
Regardless of whether Google or its contractor is to blame, I think it is pretty obvious that targeting vulnerable people for commercial gain is unethical and this is a case where data collection — something of a growing trend in Digital Signage — should absolutely be scrutinized.
