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Darker skin is harder to interpret so paler skinned people are more likely to be identified or recognised than darker skinned people.
Dark skin is harder to interpret for the current iteration of the technology. The gadget should never have left QA in that state, and the fact that it did tells you there were no dark skinned people around during testing. Talking about structural racism in these matters isn't unreasonable.
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Those dispensers work on infra red.
Whilst this is correct.
Skin colour is irrelevant.
This is incorrect.
We know there to be a statistically significant delta in reflectance and absorbance in Photoplethysmography (ie what's used for oxygen saturation and drives the heart-rate data from your garmin/fitbit/Apple Watch) across skin-tones (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-021-00408-5 , etc.).
There is also a smaller, but still significant delta in the near-IR and IR bands, up till a wavelength over the 850nm that the IR dispensers use:
(skin color scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale)
(reference: https://opg.optica.org/directpdfaccess/c0a24e54-ec7f-460e-b95000098ac41736_333549/ao-54-35-10559.pdf)The cause for this is- at least partially- Melanin's absorbance spectra, and so whilst no object can be racist, there is a difference in skin absorptivity, which has been- historically- overlooked.
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starfish&coffee
Aldosterone
@adroit
Those dispensers work on infra red. They’re not racist. Skin colour is irrelevant. It’s the position of the hand that’s relevant.
Facial recognition technology struggles with colour. Darker skin is harder to interpret so paler skinned people are more likely to be identified or recognised than darker skinned people. Not related to dark skinned people all looking the same. It’s the shadows / lack of contrast.