Facial recognition works best if you're a white guy

New York

FACIAL recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph.

When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 per cent of the time.

But the darker the skin, the more errors arise - up to nearly 35 per cent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender.

These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamw…