Some of the criticisms are technical, some are from the point of view of ethics. It would be a grave mistake to discount the ethical concerns, but if you prefer technical explanations there is quite a bit of meat there.
Thanks! That article has a lot of critique and I also like that the author collected the responses from one of the authors.
But, to me, most of the critiques seem uninformed (not made by ML practicioners) and focus on the ethics (where I agree with the authors: we need solid research into weaponized algorithms and show what is currently possible by ML practicioners, who may use such technology adversarialy, and can look at reclassifying profile pictures to the same degree as we do information about sexuality, religion, or political preference). By my estimation, most of the critiques are by people who find this research to be threatening to them, their friends, and their sexual identity. That may very well be the case, but it also leads people to conclude the scientific study was flawed and that an automated gaydar can't possibly work. Two replications by scientists who took issue with the paper, and lack incentive to fudge the data or metric to dress up their paper, also demonstrated a better than random automated gaydar. These systems work! (And that poses a problem we can now tackle, where before we did not even know this was possible, and the majority in this thread still thinks it is all bunkum).
https://greggormattson.com/2017/09/12/tracking-wang-and-kosi...
Some of the criticisms are technical, some are from the point of view of ethics. It would be a grave mistake to discount the ethical concerns, but if you prefer technical explanations there is quite a bit of meat there.