Britain’s most tattooed man says new UK age checks block him from p*rn sites as facial recognition mistakes his tattoos for a mask, calling the tech discriminatory.
It’s not a discrimination thing, I’m sure this is just facial recognition failing over his extensive facial tattoos, same as it can fail on people with very dark skin. No racism or discrimination needed to explain it, it’s just the software or sometimes even physics that causes it.
Having said that, fuck the UK government for implementing this shit.
Get your porn whilst you can because other countries will follow suit and soon even a VPN won’t save you anymore
The system is still discriminating against this guy’s face tattoos even if it’s unintentional. Hopefully they will fix the issue.
This is one of the many ethical issues that can come up when you build software. It might be just a bug for the engineers who built it but this probably ruined this guy’s whole life. I hope he can move on from this hahaha.
Agreed with all your points though. What a stupid law. It’s crazy they are popping up all over now. We are losing anonymity online. What little we had left.
same as it can fail on people with very dark skin. No racism or discrimination needed to explain it
That’s a classic case of implicit racism. The technology is tailored to perform optimally against lighter toned skin, because the people building and evaluating the software are all lighter skinned, themselves. Similarly, I’m sure, the developers of the technology didn’t bother to evaluate how it would work on people with facial skin conditions, markings, or tattoos.
In classic “Move Fast and Break Things” style, they rushed an application to market that only half worked on some people, and then told anyone who would fail the check by default that this was an individual’s problem to resolve.
The technical aspect could be a systemic SDLC problem if the software wasn’t tested on a broad enough range of users. As for what’s broad enough, that’s another issue to debate.
It’s not a discrimination thing, I’m sure this is just facial recognition failing over his extensive facial tattoos, same as it can fail on people with very dark skin. No racism or discrimination needed to explain it, it’s just the software or sometimes even physics that causes it.
Having said that, fuck the UK government for implementing this shit.
Get your porn whilst you can because other countries will follow suit and soon even a VPN won’t save you anymore
The system is still discriminating against this guy’s face tattoos even if it’s unintentional. Hopefully they will fix the issue.
This is one of the many ethical issues that can come up when you build software. It might be just a bug for the engineers who built it but this probably ruined this guy’s whole life. I hope he can move on from this hahaha.
Agreed with all your points though. What a stupid law. It’s crazy they are popping up all over now. We are losing anonymity online. What little we had left.
That’s a classic case of implicit racism. The technology is tailored to perform optimally against lighter toned skin, because the people building and evaluating the software are all lighter skinned, themselves. Similarly, I’m sure, the developers of the technology didn’t bother to evaluate how it would work on people with facial skin conditions, markings, or tattoos.
In classic “Move Fast and Break Things” style, they rushed an application to market that only half worked on some people, and then told anyone who would fail the check by default that this was an individual’s problem to resolve.
“Who cares if this system works for <Subset of People X>?” shows up in all sorts of lowest-bidder crap work, from medical studies to mechanical engineering. Whether its left-handed car drivers get fucked by a right-hand favorable design or clinical trials that just didn’t bother including women as subjects or dark-skinned people failing facial recognition, the implicit bigotry of poor engineering is rampant in our modern world.
The technical aspect could be a systemic SDLC problem if the software wasn’t tested on a broad enough range of users. As for what’s broad enough, that’s another issue to debate.