Flutterby™! : On visibility and outrage

Kameron Hurley: Rage Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum, or: Understanding the Complex Continuum of Internet Butt-Hurt*

To an outsider seeing my screaming meltdown at these two men, in which I raved and shouted and told them how they were utter assholes for harassing us, and they should fuck off, and who the fuck did they think they were, this might have seemed like the raving of some unhinged person. After all, from afar, all you see is two guys at a bus stop talking to a woman who seems deeply uncomfortable. But my rage, my “sudden” outburst was actually the result of the venting of six full months of increasing dread and terror inflicted on me not even so much by actual bad people, but people ostensibly concerned for my safety, whose admonitions that I “stay inside” and watch my back, and be careful, and who would then go on to talk about who’d been raped, shot, stabbed or mugged that week, had really started to get to me. It was a rage at the entire situation, at being expected to shut the fuck up and go inside all the time because I was a young woman. It was rage at the idea that the threat of violence so clearly worked to keep people in line.

But there's some deeper good stuff in here about visibility, and it also reminded me...

A few days ago, ColorOfChange.org ‏@ColorOfChange tweeted:

Facial recognition software built by white techies upon existing racial assumptions only reliably differentiate btwn white faces #rightscon

I recently pulled together a little OpenCV stuff to grab all of the faces out of my image library, and I'm hoping sometime over the next few to write a little code to let me label some of those faces and do a little network training to attempt to do some automatic identification of people in my image library.

A few friends are talking about a product that might incorporate this technology. Said product has a target market that's mostly white.

It is completely conceivable that said product could ship, could even get through a few product revs, before it ever hit a non-Caucasian face sample. Heck, there are a ton of face sample databases out there (that are used for training such things for demo code) that are all Caucasian.

So I can completely understand, for instance, how HP might ship racist webcams. How local bubbles can cause a lack of visibility.

So, yeah: Keep helping me out with visibility, and if anyone knows of a good dataset of non-Caucasian faces to train some software with, that'd be cool too.