Corporate Responsibility in the Age of Algorithms: HP overlooks “Dark Skin” users for its new HP Cam

Type in HP + Cam + Racism in Google Search and you will see 1,000 posts on this topic in the past 24 hours and 13,000 in the past week.

What I am most amazed by is the language that HP used in their online acknowledgment of the Youtube video:

“Everything we do is focused on ensuring that we provide a high-quality experience for all our customers, who are ethnically diverse and live and work around the world…

…. The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.”

Notice that HP never actually claims responsibility in overlooking users with darker skin color. They blame the HP Cam’s inability to track black people on the camera’s algorithm. Essentially, they blame the algorithm and the camera. HP never says that their programmers didn’t program the algorithm to process conditions with less contrast. They didn’t blame themselves for not doing careful ethnography on its diversity of users. They didn’t blame managers for not even considering non-light skin users during the entire design process!

Does this signal a new era of corporate responsibility? In the Industrial age, if a worker’s arm was cut off, the blame was placed on the machines. In the Digital Age, is the blame placed on 1’s and 0’s—those ignorant algorithms?

In both eras, the blame is placed on the inorganic objects - the technology. The managers, the programmers, the designers and the company are put in the clear.

In HP’s case, I suspect that their focus groups (if they held any), did not reflect the diversity of their customer base. I suspect that the programmers are light-skinned and do not have many friends with darker skin colors. This is a great example of how a technology’s design fails to be relevant for populations that have been historically ignored by tech companies. While in this youtube video Desi claims that “Hp Computers are Racist” with irony, underlying his statement is a history of companies ignoring black users, even them they prove to be a profitable customer base.

I hope this teach’s HP a valuable lesson, that non-light skin users, are not just end-clients. During the entire design process, the diversity of its user base should inform the way its technology is designed, programmed, tested, and launched.