An uber driver who became complainant against the company claiming the app’s facial recognition algorithm was racially biased has won an appeal to have his case heard.
The case judge ruled the driver could continue pursuing legal action against Uber, which operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 different cities worldwide.
The driver of Black and African mixed heritage claimed he was a victim of racially biased technology, a technical fault detected in some biometric technologies which NIST, the regulator, and solution providers worldwide have been tackling to mitigate. The judge agreed that technology used by Uber for facial recognition and verification purposes was insufficient and not developed to an advanced capability to mitigate the bias.
Edrissa Manjang was informed he would need to amend some aspects of his prosecutions’ case and not use emails he saved from the company as evidence in his favour of harassment. The app denied him access when attempting multiple times to verify himself, which the company admitted was a human error.
The story has been reported by both Law360 and BiometricUpdate.com, who say Manjang insisted that humans were not used for his checks, despite checks for other accounts.
The Independent Workers’ Union, based in the UK, in 2021 also pursued a court case against Uber over its facial recognition algorithm, supplied by Microsoft. The app was accused of technical bias and discrimination by not using technologies that mitigated the problem. After one particular “Real Time ID Check”, the driver was not able to complete verification several times and was then fired by Uber. No physical facial recognition test by a real person was offered to confirm his identity and his account was deactivated.
Uber argues for facial recognition that children must not be enabled to use the app to work as drivers, however, in light of new BBC reports, it transpires that, regardless, some adult drivers for Uber are nominating replacement drivers who are below the age of 18 – technically “minors”. And the company is failing to identify these younger drivers.
