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New Lawsuit Alleges Apple Watch Sensor Has Racial Bias
According to a new class action lawsuit, the blood oxygen sensor found in the Apple Watch is racially biased against people with dark skin tones, Apple Insider is reporting.
Plaintiff Alex Morales, who bought an Apple Watch between 2020 and 2021, claims he didn’t know the pulse oximetry features of the watch are affected by skin tone.
Morales filed the lawsuit on December 24 on behalf of all New York consumers who bought an Apple Watch during the statutes of limitations.
The lawsuit also accuses Apple of breaches of express warranty, fraud, and unjust enrichment, claiming violations of New York General Business Law and State Consumer Fraud Acts.
“For decades, there have been reports that such devices were significantly less accurate in measuring blood oxygen levels based on skin color,” alleges the lawsuit against Apple.
“The ‘real world significance’ of this bias lay unaddressed until the middle of the Coronavirus pandemic, which converged with a greater awareness of structural racism which exists in many aspects of society,” it adds.
The lawsuit also claims that researchers “confirmed the clinical significance of racial bias of pulse oximetry using records of patients taken during and before the pandemic.”
As a result, “reliance on pulse oximetry to triage patients and adjust supplemental oxygen levels may place Black patients at increased risk for hypoxemia.”
Morales has also sued Apple on behalf of residents in Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming under those states’ consumer fraud laws.
Back in 2015, some users complained that black wrist tattoos interfered with the device’s heart sensor. Apple later confirmed the issue by saying any changes to your skin, such as some tattoos, can also impact heart rate sensor performance.
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“Structural racism”….FFS, light goes through pale skin better than dark skin. It’s physics.
Enough with this woke $h1t.
Humans are coming in different shades and colors. Develop products only test in light skinned people is an issue. Cameras, video conferencing software, Apple Watches, … should be tested and developed with this in mind. The amount of white peoples are smaller on this planet than the rest. If it take this to force them realizing it, so be it. In medicine research, for to long scientist was seeing kids as small adults as male with a bit more hormones. It’s not the case. So that woke nonsense.
I’m sure it was tested with that in mind. That won’t change the physics. Light will always be affected by the medium that it passes through. That’s not racism, it’s reality.
The next demand will be to degrade the system so that it’s equally poor for all. Woke nonsense.
People have been trained to see racism everywhere.
About time people start caring about other people that are different.
And far past time people stop trying to make literally everything about themselves and their ”victimhood”.
Virtue signaling is not caring, it’s about narcissism, your narcissism.
To add to It’s Me’s nice explanation, this has been well known and studied for at least 30 years. It is not a problem of testing products only on people with light skin, others have been tested for years. Oximeters are used in medicine and as mentioned there is a physical reality here that less pigmented skin is easier to read through as logically you would expect since the reader has to read through the pigment. There has been a lot of testing and oximeters continue to improve for everyone. I would suggest that it is irresponsible to assume discrimination here without basic research and to make incorrect claims about product testing that are easy to look into with a few minutes of research on oximeters, which I think you should have done. It’s not fair to people who have really faced discrimination. It’s also quite strange to criticize Apple for implementing a technology that has been used for decades in medicine for a limitation that is inherent to the technology and not new.
Try to see if you can identify the blue of people’s arm veins visually in people with different skin colours? Then try to improve your vision with glasses, getting closer, and even with a microscope and you’ll probably be able to see it better for everyone with a better signal but you’ll notice that skin colour will impact your results. Consider if you are being racist here or if you are just facing a physical limitation. Then consider someone claiming you’re racist without understanding any of this by just making assumptions instead of trying to understand.
Quite reasonable and rational explanation. Anyone to whom these facts are not self evident should read it.
You dear Sir/person are in need of serious help…and some basic education that might help explain that in this stupid universe we live in, the laws of physics are unfortunately not governed by CRT.
Look it up or better ask a friend to look it up for you and explain the concepts.
Oh, try some phrase construct exercise while you’re at it, as I couldn’t understand your point – if there was one. Could be just me and my white privilege…so do educate away.
People who think like you are the reason I stopped calling myself a liberal a few years ago. To sane people, there’s no difference between the far left and far right. You both hurt society.
My black cat comes out worse looking on shots both on iPhone and Canon cameras than my orange cat. I better sue both Canon & Apple for an orange bias. To a wokester with a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
It’s not bias, it’s a fact of optical physics. I can understand if the complain was about Apple not disclosing the lower accuracy of the pulse oximetry for people with darker skin tones before the purchase but accusing them for racial bias is nonsense. It’s a product with one of its features that doesn’t work equally well for all people. They may be accused for not informing the potential customers that might be affected by it abut that fact, but who would think that Apple would intentionally or by omission exclude certain group of people from the pool of potential customers?
Any sunscreen product with even the highest SPF doesn’t protect lighter coloured people as well as those with darker skin. Should they sue the sunscreen companies for that?
Nice point about sunscreen
The best outcome is for a judge to simply declare the lawsuit without merit and order Morales to pay the associated costs.
This would send a clear message to others looking to enrich themselves by exploiting a woke societal weakness: skin color.
Sh.t, looking forward to a lawsuit by the monkeys accusing Darwin of bias in his evolution theory.
Next, someone will sue the makers of tattoo ink because it isn’t as visible on dark skin as on light skin. Or some ginger will try to sue someone because they burn more easily and that’s obvious inherent bias in sunlight.
The wokism cult has convinced everyone they are a victim. They literally have to make things up to fit into a victimhood narrative.
🤦🏻♂️