From KQED
Waymo, Alphabet Sued for Bias After AI Allegedly Mislabels SF Doctor as Terrorist
By
After two years of trying and failing to sign up for Waymo, friends inside the company told Dr. Nasser Mohamed his Middle Eastern Muslim name set off the AI identity screening. But Dr. Mohamed alleges he couldn’t get a human to correct the error. So now he’s suing the company and its corporate parent, Alphabet.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court, the Qatari-born-and-raised-physician claimed Alphabet, Inc. and its subsidiary Waymo, LLC, discriminated against him based on ethnicity, religion, and national origin when they denied him equal access to their services after their artificial intelligence-powered identity verification program erroneously identified him as a terrorist on the U.S. Government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions List...
Without more details from Waymo or Alphabet, it’s unclear how they are verifying customers’ identities.
“In fairness, I don’t know what Waymo is doing to verify identity,” wrote Hany Farid of UC Berkeley’s School of Information. “But if it is only doing a simplistic name matching, this is inexcusable because we now have fairly good technology to verify identity that is light years ahead of a simplistic (and lazy) name matching.”
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
