Thread by @KimZetter

Google workers gave $5 gift cards to get people to provide scan of their face, but didn’t say it was for developing facial recognition of dark-skinned faces nydailynews.com/news/national/…

Teams were dispatched to target homeless people in Atlanta, students on college campuses and attendees of the BET Awards in LA. They were told to go after people of color and conceal fact that faces were being recorded - instead telling them it was just a selfie.

“If the person were to look at that screen after the task had been completed, and say, ‘Oh, was it taking a video?’… we were instructed to say, ‘Oh it’s not really’”

“One of the days of training was basically building a vocabulary that distracts the user...sensory overloading the person into getting it done as quickly as possible and distracting them as much as possible so they didn’t even really have time to realize what was going on.”

“They said to target homeless people because they’re the least likely to say anything to the media,” the ex-staffer said. “The homeless people didn’t know what was going on at all.”

“They said they wanted us to test out a new phone, an Android. I put in my email. My guy told me to do it all really quick. He kept saying, ‘Hit next and upload. Next and upload.’ I thought they were students, said a student who participated on a college campus.

“We had to follow a dot with our nose. I did the action of holding the phone up to my face,” another student said.
“They said it was a survey and we thought they were students. I don’t think I even realized there was a consent form.”

One reason for rushing participants thru the scanning process was to keep them from reading the consent form at the end that must be clicked for the scan to be counted, one worker said. The consent form let’s Google retain the 3D scans for 5 yrs and do whatever it wants with them

Correction: consent form says Google can keep scans “as long as needed to fulfill the purposes which is expected to be about 5 yrs.” Also gives Google right to “retain, use or share non-personally identifying or aggregate data without limitation for any purpose...”

And that they data can be processed “outside the country,” including places “where you may have fewer rights.”