This image stuck in my head after I watched Joy Buolamwini’s Ted Talk “How I’m fighting bias in algorithms”. She talked about how bias in algorithms are systematic, the data set they use to train machine for facial recognition is not diverse enough that it can not recognize Joy Buolamwini’s face and tell her that no face was detected. I remember the Hong Kong conference example she gave about, that how she’s the only one who’s face wasn’t recognized by the machine, and how bias in algorithms can travel so far so quickly.
This photo was from John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” show, in this show he focused on how facial recognition can be harm to people’s privacy and violates human rights when used in wrong way. This image stood out because this is when the founder of clear view uses the reporter’s current photo and tracked to a photo of the reporter when he was 16 years old. The founder Hoan Ton-That emphasized that he will only work with the authorities with his software, but it also raise concern that if a country who has a very different opinion on people’s sexual orientation could use it to harm people that they consider “not normal” or “a sin”, he didn’t answer the question directly, which could really make people including myself have trouble to believe his statements and “good intention”.