Okay my point was that the article very early calls out "targeting people of color" and only addresses that much later, clearly trying to get attention on that aspect. Telling people what you're doing and how much you pay them is completely unrelated to Google telling them to target people of color, though I agree lying is scummy.

But since you brought it up, how much money could they have paid to make you not feel like they're exploiting the homeless? You could have everyone read and sign complicated legalese consent forms and really just end up not giving a bunch of homeless people some money.

edit: Presumably this is happening on public property, so they have a right to take people's pictures anyway. I don't know what the laws are regarding rights to use people's "likenesses" the way many entertainment venues tell you they can, but I'd expect using it for model training is going to have a pretty low bar. If they weren't lying they're paying someone to look at a camera for 5 seconds. Hell, I'd agree to that and I'm not even concerned about how I'm going to pay for my dinner tonight.

You can argue that lying would be objectionable, but we’re talking about something with essentially no consequences here. As for the fee, how much are their faces worth beyond a fee they were obviously already willing to accept?