As far back as 1985 Brian Winston wrote[1], "It is one such expression – color film that more readily photographs Caucasians than other human types – that is our concern in this piece." Richard Dyer wrote in 1997, "The aesthetic technology of photography, as it has been invented, refined, and elaborated, and the dominant uses of that technology, as they have become fixed and naturalised, assume and privilege the white subject."[2].
Key findings in the bias of facial recognition come from a 2018 paper in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research which found, "We evaluate 3 commercial gender classification systems using our dataset and show that darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%. The substantial disparities in the accuracy of classifying darker females, lighter females, darker males, and lighter males in gender classification systems require urgent attention if commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent and accountable facial analysis algorithms."
Key findings in the bias of facial recognition come from a 2018 paper in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research which found, "We evaluate 3 commercial gender classification systems using our dataset and show that darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%. The substantial disparities in the accuracy of classifying darker females, lighter females, darker males, and lighter males in gender classification systems require urgent attention if commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent and accountable facial analysis algorithms."
1 "A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image" <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025012>
2 Dyer, Richard. 1997. White : Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge.
3 "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification" <https://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html>