Google: Withdrawal from face scan project

Google: Withdrawal from face scan project

New York, 26.11.2019

Google has finished its facial scan project „dark skin“ in its previous form. This was triggered by several critical articles in the US media. The project is also said to have violated internal guidelines.

The background for this action was a problem in facial recognition that had existed for many years. These programs were often not able to detect dark-skinned people correctly. The result was increasing protests by those affected. Google intended to scan as many faces as possible for training data in order to eliminate this problem in the future.

But instead of doing the data collection itself, a contract was awarded to an outside company. Their employees obviously didn’t proceed very squeamishly. Among other things, homeless blacks were persuaded to have themselves photographed for 5 dollars.

The consequence: A Google speaker announced, one will collect the faces on the Google Campus. „In the future, the work will only be carried out on Google pages in order to guarantee better control over research and interaction with the participants,“ said the company spokesman.