Smartphone companies will hate to admit this, but their imaging solutions—photography and videography—have been designed to capture the beauty of only white or fair-skinned people.
It doesn’t matter which country the smartphone maker is based in—South Korea, the USA, India, or China—the algorithms that work behind the lenses to give out images have been designed for white or fair-skinned people.
The underrepresentation or misrepresentation of people with darker skin tones in photographs is a well-documented problem stemming from historical biases. Photography and films have traditionally prioritized and calibrated imaging technologies based on lighter skin tones.
However, because of tech, and the proliferation of cameras, these biases have been carried over and exacerbated.
Only white people photograph well on most smartphones. Even when making smartphones for markets other than Europe or the Americas, manufacturers don’t tweak their algorithms to show skin tones correctly.
Here are five pieces of evidence that prove that smartphone cameras were developed only for people with fair skin.
Failing to capture the right skin tone
Almost all smartphone cameras struggle to photograph people with dark skin, even under perfect lighting conditions. The situation becomes much worse when lighting conditions become tricky.
Usually, they will blow up the highlights of the skin and give subjects weird-looking patches of white skin or make them look darker than they are.
In 2021, Google had to make special adjustments to its Pixel phone’s camera algorithms because they were called out on social media for the terrible way their cameras handled people of color.
Almost all smartphone manufacturers, be it Apple, Samsung, or any other manufacturer, have this issue. Despite its partnership with Leica and OnePlus, Xiaomi still struggles to nail skin color tones perfectly despite its association with Hasselblad.
It is only in recent times that these companies have started working on getting the skin tone somewhat right. They still have a long way to go.
Oversaturating colors
The way human brains are designed is that we tend to favor saturation and contrast over color accuracy, especially when looking at photos on display. Most smartphone camera makers tend to over-saturate their images to cater to this.
This is especially true for Samsung and Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi and OnePlus. While flagships from Samsung and OnePlus tend to have some control over how much they overdo the saturations, Budget smartphones from the likes of Xiaomi, Realme, and sometimes, even OnePlus, tend to go overboard.
As a result, certain people get this very weird yellow looking on their skin. Others get a peculiar reddish hue to their skin.
Facial recognition failures
This issue plagues Asian people with monolid eyes or epicanthic folds. People with dark skin are also affected by several points.
When Apple introduced its facial recognition tech, FaceID, in iPhones, they used a TrueDepth camera, which works by projecting thousands of invisible dots onto your face and analyzing them to create a depth map of your face. As a result, Apple’s FaceID works well, whether in a dark room or under direct sunlight, irrespective of your skin tone.
Other smartphone makers tried to copy the tech but used regular front-facing cameras. This is true for many budget-friendly Chinese smartphones from Xiaomi, Realme, and the lot. Their systems compared two images, the one that it saw when you tried to unlock the phone with the image that you “trained” your device while setting up.
If the lighting conditions were too different, or if you had too much difference in your skin tone or eyelid, it would simply refuse to work. Furthermore, this low facial recognition tech failed to work for people with dark skin in dark surroundings.
Beauty filters or modes that brighten the skin to beautify
Beauty filters or beauty modes are their beasts. They also are the worst ways tech companies showcase their disregard for people with dark skin or different facial features.
Not only do most beauty filters obliterate certain facial features, but they also brighten subjects’ skin tone exponentially. Remember those old commercials for skin-whitening creams? That’s how most beauty filters work.
What’s worse is its psychological effect on people and communities – as harmful as those skin-whitening creams themselves.
It is not that tech companies or smartphones are inherently racist. The people developing these technologies, usually made in US companies, are overwhelmingly using data sets that white people heavily influence.
What tech companies and smartphone makers can be accused of is ignorance. We’re not sure if that’s a good enough defense.
Firstpost reached out to several smartphone makers for a comment on this, but none had responded by the time of filing of this report.
