This summer the American portal "The Verge" published that Google employees had been traveling the streets of several cities in the United States and offering passers-by 5 dollars in exchange for allowing them to have a facial scan . The aim of this campaign was to improve the recognition algorithm of the new smartphone of the Silicon Valley, the Pixel 4 . Now the newspaper " The New York Daily News " publishes that a company outsourced by technology for this purpose, Randstad , employed homeless people in the city of Atlanta to carry out the tests.
According to the American media, their sources, which in theory are people who were working on this project, were dedicated to "targeting homeless people and people with dark skin, often without saying they were working for Google." Sometimes, he picks up the "Daily News", they did n't even explain clearly that they were recording their faces . "They addressed the homeless because they are the least likely to say something to the media," a former employee of the company told the US newspaper. "The homeless did not know what was happening at all," he added.
And, as they point out, those in charge of carrying out the scan presented the test as a kind of "game of selfies . " "We simply told them to play with the phone for a couple of minutes and that in return they would get a gift card," explain the former employees in statements collected by " The Verge ." This reward was worth $ 5 . Exactly the same amount that the rest of companies subcontracted by Google offered to the rest of participants in the test of the algorithm.
That Randstad, according to "The New York Daily News", was carrying out this type of practice does not imply that Google was up to date. Moreover, he had no obligation to be . The process of collecting facial data to train artificial intelligence is very common among technology companies. Apple used it at the time to develop its Face ID . The Cupertino firm, as explained by its vice president Cynthia Hogan at the time, devised its algorithm to work regardless of the user's race or ethnicity. To train him, they used about a billion photographs .
Regarding the treatment of the data of those who sell their facial information, Google explains that “although facial samples cannot be anonymous, each participant is assigned an abstract identity number. We keep the email address of each participant separately, to remove the data of those who request it.
The data will be kept by the company for 18 months . At the same time, Google claims that the faces of Pixel 4 users will not be stored on the company's servers, but on the Titan M security chip of the device. In turn, the information that is stored in Soli, the motion radar that will incorporate the terminal, will also "remain on the phone and never be saved or shared with other Google services," they say from the technology. It is expected that on October 15 the new terminal will be presented within the "Made by Google" event, which will take place in New York (United States).
