Racist Webcams?

A story you may have missed over the festive period: A video emerged on YouTube early in December which showed a Webcam, apparently an HP model, failing to follow a black person’s face on-screen while the facial-tracking system appeared to begin working properly again when a white woman stepped in front of the same camera.

“I think my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me,” the guy in the video said. “I’m going on record and I’m saying it: Hewlett-Packard computers are racist.”

HP have insisted – naturally enough – that their web cameras are not racist and are seeking to fix what is clearly a technological, rather than proto-fascist, problem.