Computer Bias

Intentional or Purposeful Bias

What age groups use Facebook vs Tiktok?

Facebook: ~ 25 to 34
TikTok: ~ 10 to 19

The data says that Facebook has an older, millenial audience, versus Tiktok with a younger, teenage audience. There is no purposeful exclusion, because there is no limited access, it is the user’s choice which platform to use, different generations are just attracted to different platforms. Businesses could benefit from having a wider age range audience, however it is not harmful and doesn’t need to be corrected, as there are no actual harmful effects in having a skewed audience.

Why do virtual assistants have female voices?

i.e. Amazon, Alexa Google, Apple Siri.

Women are seen as gentler, and society has given women the role of assisting others. Women’s voices tend to be more articulate and clear, better for users. It’s not entirely harmful, but could be corrected, as it sort of enforces gender stereotypes. This can be corrected by giving the user the option to choose what kind of voice they want to hear.

Algorithm that influences your decisions:

Social media apps give users recommended videos, based on their browsing habits. They track what content you are more attracted to, then feeding you their content based on these likes. This causes you to be involuntarily more drawn to that company’s products and content, as you see a lot of it and its positive, advertised side.

HP Computers are Racist

The face-tracking feature on the black person’s computer does not work on him, but it does work on his friend, White Wanda.

Does the owner of the computer think this was intentional?

Yes, the owner thinks that the computer is intentionally not tracking his face because he is black.

How do you think this happened?

The computer is unable to track his face because it doesn’t recognize his skin color as a user. The company probably only tested their face tracking feature on white people, so they were not aware or didn’t care that the face tracker might not work on other skin colors.

Is this harmful? Was it intended to be harmful or exclude?

It is harmful, but it probably was not intended to be. It prohibits black or darker skinned people from using their products. It was probably just a design and testing error, but it still ended up being harmful.

Should it be corrected?

Yes, it should be corrected so everyone can utilize their products, and not discirminated because of their skin tone.

What would you or should you do to produce a better outcome?

I would make the camera and program more sensitive to every skin tone, and test it on all sorts of skin tones before pushing it out to an audience.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing provides the ability to obtain shared information, share information, and participate in distributed computing.

  • Reduce computer bias
  • Reach beyond community

Evidence of Crowdsourcing

Hacks

Our Project

We can add a forum where women can discuss their own personal remedies to their periods, because medical diagnosed remedies may not actually be useful to everyone, but learning about other people’s personal experience and methods may let the user find which one is right for them.

Our Enviroment

CompSci has 150 ish principles students. Describe a crowdsource idea and how you might initiate it in our environment?

Slack is sort of a crowdsource resource in our CSP enviroment, as we share problems and solutions with our peers. We can initiate a site, just for posting general solutions and ideas for CSP.