Google contractors have been specifically targeting dark skinned homeless people and college students in the US to collect their facial details, the Daily News reported. To collect this data, contractors working for Google reportedly lied to some people and concealed the fact that they were collecting their facial details in order to maximise their data collection, per the report. The company is undertaking this exercise to improve the face unlocking feature on its upcoming Pixel 4 device, the report said. How people were misled: These contractors misled some people under the garb of characterising the scan as a “selfie game”, “mini-game” and “just playing with the phone” to get $5. The third-party firm, Randstand, that Google has outsourced this data collection exercise to, also instructed its employees to not tell subjects that they were being recorded, as per the report. The contractors — referred to as TVCs (temps, vendors or contractors) by Google — were encouraged to rush subjects through survey questions and a consent agreement and walk away if people started to get suspicious. Randstand sent TVCs to Atlanta to “specifically” target homeless black people, the report continues. “It was a lot of basically sensory overloading the person into getting it done as quickly as possible and distracting them as much as possible so they didn’t even really have time to realize what was going on.” — Daily News report Problems with the consent form: The consent agreement form (available at Daily News) that these subjects had to sign as part…
