In an opinion piece in Parool, The Racism and Technology Center wrote about how Dutch universities use proctoring software that uses facial recognition technology that systematically disadvantages students of colour (see the English translation of the opinion piece). Earlier the center has written on the racial bias of these systems, leading to black students being excluded from exams or being labeled as frauds because the software did not properly recognise their faces as a face. Despite the clear proof that Procorio disadvantages students of colour, the University of Amsterdam has still used Proctorio extensively in this June’s exam weeks.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Proctoring software disadvantaging students of colour in the Netherlands”Racist Technology in Action: Predicting future criminals with a bias against Black people
In 2016, ProPublica investigated the fairness of COMPAS, a system used by the courts in the United States to assess the likelihood of a defendant committing another crime. COMPAS uses a risk assessment form to assess this risk of a defendant offending again. Judges are expected to take this risk prediction into account when they decide on sentencing.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Predicting future criminals with a bias against Black people”Racist Technology in Action: Speech recognition systems by major tech companies are biased
From Siri, to Alexa, to Google Now, voice-based virtual assistants have increasingly become ubiquitous in our daily lives. So, it is unsurprising that yet another AI technology – speech recognition systems – has been reported to be biased against black people.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Speech recognition systems by major tech companies are biased”Racist Technology in Action: Amazon’s racist facial ‘Rekognition’
An already infamous example of racist technology is Amazon’s facial recognition system ‘Rekognition’ that had an enormous racial and gender bias. Researcher and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League Joy Buolawini (the ‘poet of code‘), together with Deborah Raji, meticulously reconstructed how accurate Rekognition was in identifying different types of faces. Buolawini and Raji’s study has been extremely consequencial in laying bare the racism and sexism in these facial recognition systems and was featured in the popular Coded Bias documentary.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: Amazon’s racist facial ‘Rekognition’”Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers
In 2015, when T.J. Fitzpatrick visited a conference in Atlanta, he wasn’t able to use any of the soap dispensers in the bathroom.
Continue reading “Racist technology in action: White only soap dispensers”Racist technology in action: Gun, or electronic device?

The answer to that question depends on your skin colour, apparently. An AlgorithmWatch reporter, Nicholas Kayser-Bril, conducted an experiment that went viral on Twitter, showing that Google Vision Cloud (a service which is based on a subset of AI known as “computer vision” that focuses on automated image labelling), labelled an image of a dark-skinned individual holding a thermometer with the word “gun”, whilst a lighter skinned individual was labelled holding an “electronic device”.
Continue reading “Racist technology in action: Gun, or electronic device?”Racist technology in action: Cropping out the non-white
A recent, yet already classic, example of racist technology is Twitter’s photo cropping machine learning algorithm. The algorithm was shown to consistently preference white faces in the cropped previews of pictures.
Continue reading “Racist technology in action: Cropping out the non-white”