This might be a naive question, but is darker skin just harder to see for shitty web cameras and cameras generally, especially in low-light indoor study environments? So the software doesn’t get the data it needs in the first place. I know that cinematographers often illuminate dark and light skin differently to account for the way light behaves when reflected off different colors.
Your question may be more relevant than you think. Yes, lack of illumination will obscure capture of any scene, if making it dark enough. This is a consequence of our imaging technology. Even great cameras are severely limited in how they can make sense of light that reaches them, never able to reproduce more than a slice of available contrasts (depth?).
Your cinematographers seem aware of this of course, and it touches an idea a photographer introduced me to. That one could draw parallels between photography as a technology, and the issues surfacing in image recognition and biased deep learning etc.
Photography has been shaped by environments even less concerned by such issues. Technology refined and calibrated over decades, to attain the perfect shot by those with the means to access a camera, the perfect shot of those most often subject to it.
Even worse, an education company built a solution that works for only ~10% of the human population. The customers should get a refund, damages, and throw that software in the trash.
