8 times technology proved to be racist

How did anybody do anything before iPhones, Google, social media, and GPS? Technology makes life more convenient in many ways, but one downside of the industry is that it perpetuates a long-standing institutional problem: racism.

Modern tech has a history of privileging whiteness. Take, for example, photography. Since the early 20th century, light skin tones have been considered the “ideal standard” when calibrating skin tones in photos, according to a 2009 paper.

Some 21st-century technology also shows similar racial biases, and sheds light on the industry’s diversity problem. A workforce that’s overwhelmingly white can lead to oversights when developing new products, failing to take people of color into account.

Read our list of eight examples of tech's racial blind spots:

The League is an “elite” dating app that determines the eligibility of potential users based on professional information (e.g. resume, education, etc.) from their LinkedIn profiles. The app then uses an algorithm to match “high-quality” users to each other. But one troubling requirement of The League’s application process is that it requires users to reveal their race, which is usually optional for other dating sites. And if photos from their parties are any indication, the app skews very white. While The League is more explicit in its requirements, data from other major dating apps suggest that their users also use race/ethnicity filters in ways that reflect racial bias. Co-founder and president of OkCupid Christian Rudder told NPR that among its 4 million unique visitors, black users are affected the most negatively by racial bias. They get lower ratings, fewer responses, and fewer received messages on the site, according to company data. While some argue that it’s simply a matter of preference, the data points to sexual racism.

This viral video, uploaded to YouTube in September, shows an automatic soap dispenser at an Atlanta hotel failing to work when a black man places his hands under the nozzle. When his white friend does the same, however, the nozzle dispenses foamy soap into the man’s palm.

Although there’s humor to the video, it exposes a glaring flaw in how modern technology favors lighter skin. Here’s how the dispenser works: An infrared beam shoots out from an LED just under the nozzle, and in order to trigger the dispenser, the beam has to be reflected back to the sensor. If light is absorbed, the soap is never dispensed. That’s what happens when someone with darker skin puts their hand under the nozzle; on the contrary, lighter skin reflects the LED beam more easily. To avoid these kinds of problems, companies should test their technology on a variety of skin tones.

Flickr and Google came under fire earlier this year when images of black people in their photo apps were labeled with the tags “ape” and “gorilla.” Both companies promptly apologized and removed the offensive tags, but many believe that this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” Google said in a statement. “There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”

For Google’s part, much of the problem stemmed from the fact that few photos of black people were uploaded to the app during development, and few black people were involved in product testing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This speaks to a larger problem of underrepresentation of minorities in Silicon Valley.

Joz Wang bought a new camera, the Nikon Coolpix S630, for her mother in 2009. It boasted a special facial-detection feature that was designed to improve the quality of portrait pictures. The only problem? The camera kept telling Wang, a Taiwanese-American, that she was blinking her eyes.

"Did someone blink?” the camera prompted on its screen.

“Racist Camera! No, I did not blink…I’m just Asian!” Wang responded in a blog post.

However unintentional, the S630’s technology seems to favor white faces.

Nextdoor.com launched in 2011 as a private social network “for you, your neighbors, and your community.”Its “crime and safety” section allows residents to report “suspicious activity,” but East Bay Express reported that this mostly affects black or Latino residents living in gentrified neighborhoods. Indeed, the newspaper found that users will report a black person even if they only have a few details about them, such as “black” or “wearing a hoodie.”

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia recently acknowledged his app’s racial-profiling problem, and is working with Oakland-based community group Neighbors for Racial Justice to improve it. For starters, Tolia promised to add a buttonthat lets users flag posts for racial profiling.

A similar app called GroupMe, based in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., yields the same results. GroupMe was started by Georgetown businesses and the D.C. police to help stop shoplifting, a growing problem for local stores. However, the Washington Post reported that of the of the 3,000-plus messages retail shops sent via GroupMe since January of this year, nearly 70 percent of the people reported were black. “The employees often allege shoplifting. But other times, retailers don’t accuse these shoppers of anything beyond seeming suspicious,” according to the Post.

The controversy surrounding these apps followed outrage over SketchFactor, a now-defunct app launched by two white developers to rate neighborhoods based on their “sketchiness,” which some consider to be code for lower-income black communities.

Perhaps the biggest hardware release since the iPhone, gadget enthusiasts everywhere highly anticipated the Apple Watch’s release. One of its noteworthy features is the heart rate monitor, which uses a device called the "pulse oximeter" that emits infrared light through a user's wrist to measure the oxidation of their blood. The oximeter determines a user's heart rate based on how much light is absorbed through the skin and blood cells. The problem with this technology, however, is that it doesn’t work on dark or tattooed skin.

During product testing, only Apple executives are allowed access to teams involved in the development. So in the Apple Watch's case, it's possible that executives—the top 10 of whom are all white—didn't consider testing on a variety of skin types early on. Although the company addressed the tattoo issue, which also affects Apple's heart-rate monitor, it has yet to mention the device's issue with darker skin.

Search any human body part in Google Images, and one pattern quickly emerges: Virtually all of the stock photos that pop up show white bodies—whether you search “leg,” “arm,” “handsome man,” or “beauty.”

We know that there is no single ideal standard for beauty, yet these results suggest whiteness is the norm. Search images of black people, however, and hypersexual caricatures that play on white stereotypes of black culture emerge. (Suggested image groups when searching for “black person” in Google Images include “eating chicken” and “watermelon.”)

Online photo searches also perpetuate the whitewashing of media images. When Daniel Villarreal of pop-culture news site Unicorn Booty entered “black woman large dog” into Google Images, the results mostly produced images of white women with large dogs.

All too often, gaming apps invoke stereotypical images of people of color, and although many of the apps that previously stirred controversyare no longer around, racist portrayals in games persist.

Of the folded apps, Mexicans were the butt of the joke in Mariachi Hero Grande and I-Immigrate. The former features a cigar-smoking, gun-slinging mariachi who stomps on cockroaches and shoots tequila bottles, while the latter depicts a Mexican rat named El Queso.

Two offensive apps that are still around are Illegal Immigration: A Game and Pocket God. Illegal Immigration is a mock immigration test that associates undocumented immigration with 9/11 (according to the game's description on iTunes, it "was developed by two individuals affected by the 9/11 attacks"). In Pocket God, the user is an “all-powerful god that rules over the primitive islanders”—that is, cartoon “pygmies” with bones in their hair.