I sort of expected this would happen when I saw how it works. Yeah it works most of the time, but even if/when it works it's mostly in the way. We asked our daughter (a blonde, BTW) to turn that off, the effect was nauseating. And, btw, it's not moving the camera, it's that the camera has more pixels than really needed, so the software only looks for the best crop with the face smack in the middle of it.
And so it happened, you put your laptop to have lots of neon lights in the background, and have a black guy whose face the software won't recognize. He should be lucky, though - there may be many security cameras which will be likewise fooled. There may be a business opportunity, maybe as a security tester?
Though in this case I don't think it was racism, it was just "it sort of works, ship it". This is nearly AI, it's optical recognition, an already fuzzy area, and I did bet with myself (and won, of course) that they wouldn't cover all the human diversity. Just like it goes with any other human-machine interaction, the societal side of it is initially set to cover only the nearest environment of its creator. If it's about text, it will know only English and 26 characters, then maybe Western accented stuff, then maybe (if ever) the rest of the world. If it's about measurements, it will use inches and pounds; accommodations for SI will come, maybe later. If it's about time, the dates will have that weird and illogical down-then-up format (instead of good old American Standard format), and other formats may come later. The day will have twice twelve hours... maybe twenty four, some time in the future. It will work for right handers only, may cover lefties once. It will list sports... that the author knows of. It will work for the likes of its creators. And when they are satisfied with it, they'll try to sell it to other people like them... but the market is big, and the product will meet human diversity.
This kind of shortsightedness is, maybe, a kind of inertial racism. It's not "we hate other kinds of people". It's "we don't think about other kinds of people". It's not what one does, it's what one forgets/neglects to.
