Interesting article from Fast Company showing how technology isn’t immune from systemic racism and steps new creators can take to overcome this.
Consider the evidence: Many wearable heart rate trackers rely on technology that could be less reliable for users with darker skin, which negatively impacts people of color whose employers incentivize employees’ use of fitness trackers with extra vacation days, gear, or even lower health insurance premiums. Recent studies on facial recognition technologies find that many of these systems perform poorly on Black faces, “compounding the problem of racist policing practices and a deeply flawed and harmful criminal justice system,” Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League writes on Medium. Even within the sectors of the tech community that advocate for human-centered design, such as human-computer interaction, little has been done to grapple with racism. “Historically, the human-computer interaction community has not focused on issues of race and ethnicity,” according to a call for participation in a workshop on race at the 2020 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. “In recent years, there has been a growing trickle of interest in studying and engaging with race and ethnicity, but much more must be done.”
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