Coded Bias: A Movie Reflection
Coded Bias follows Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist and researcher in exploring the racial and gender biases that have arisen in technology, and are now being explored in-depth. She also interviews respected people in the field, like Zeynep Tüfeçki, a sociologist who focuses on technology (and whom I follow on Twitter), and many others. This documentary illustrates the many ways in which technology can be biased, as well as going further into exploring why these biases exist. This film highlights a number of topics such as: facial recognition technologies, algorithms, surveillance in Hong Kong, and more. The biases that are explored are rooted in racism and classism. Inherently, these systems are not racist, classist, or prejudiced. However, these digital systems are instead taught by humans who have biases (or straight up are sexist, racist, ageist, and other “-ists”).
One of the most important things that I learned from this documentary is, “Data is a reflection of our history”. This idea really stuck out to me. This being said, I think that data is also a reflection of current “history” and practices. Sometimes I feel that racism and other “isms” are always based on “past” systems, deflecting blame to past generations or ideas. However these racist systems are currently being upheld meaning, yes, we are still living in an inherently racist, ageist, and sexist system. Many of the standards in technology are reflected as those who created them, which is predominantly young or middle-aged white men.
I found the entire Hong Kong situation to be interesting, empowering, and extremely saddening. Protestors are “anti-surveillance” and many have banded together to destroy cameras often embedded with facial recognition technology. This has an interesting parallel and similarity to the protests in Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd. During protests, protestors were encouraged to shut off their phones and to not even bring them, due to being tracked. Along with this, during these protests, taking photos of faces was highly discouraged, especially protests that went after curfew as there were reports of protestors being identified and taken. I think that there is a huge contradiction to surveillance technology. On one hand it is supposed to protect and add safety, however I feel that throughout the world that these technologies are being used for more dystopian practices than ever before.
During the documentary, I had an interesting conversation with my partner and his roommates. One of his roommates is from Taiwan with many friends in Hong Kong and participating in these protests. He explained how intense the surveillance and censorship is. Certain phrases put on the internet can get someone placed in prison. Of course, watching the documentary was informative and honestly, gut-wrenching, it was even more intense hearing the perspective from someone I know personally.
