Last year when a store employee with tongue planted firmly in cheek made a humorous YouTube video about HP Webcams being “racist”, HP the company had no choice but to respond in a serious tone and many tech publications did the same.  The problem is that the intent of the original video wasn’t clear and company lawyers understandably get cautious whenever they hear words like “racism” thrown around in the same sentence as their products.  Even it was most likely a joke, companies can’t afford to be associated with racism.  Now we have the same kind of nonsensical allegations of “racism” being tossed at Microsoft’s XBox360 Kinect product.

Consumer reports correctly identified the HP issue as a technological limitation and they’ve debunked the new claims against Microsoft.  Consumer Reports points out that motion recognition (used for game play) has no problem because it uses infrared but facial recognition may be problematic with lower lighting.  This technological limitation is completely understandable considering the difficulty of doing any kind of video or photography with ambient indoor lighting with a high-end SLR camera much less a tiny webcam sensor.

Darker subjects which absorb more light simply require more lighting to achieve the same exposure and that is a fundamental behavior of physics.  The same laws of physics make laser hair removal more difficult for darker skinned patients.  As serious an accusation of racism is, it’s not something one should joke about without at least making it obvious that it’s a joke.  We should reserve our scorn for real racism where it exists and not waste time on non-issues.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]