Passport system rejects this dude's photo for a pretty racist reason

Racism is bad enough with humans, but when computers start laying it into you? That just sucks.

It's something that happened to Richard Lee, a New Zealand citizen who is studying in Melbourne, Australia.

He was renewing his New Zealand passport recently online, when the automated system rejected his photo.

It thought his eyes were closed, and hence didn't meet the country's passport picture requirements.

So awkward.

The screenshot was posted on the page of Australian DJs Mashd N Kutcher on Facebook, who said they were a friend of Lee's.

As for Lee himself, he thought it was pretty funny and isn't offended by it.

"I found it hilarious actually, not racist," he told Mashable via Messenger. "It's pretty impressive that in the past 80 years we went from Turing Machines to a computer software that could read a face and determine that the eyes were smaller than usual."

It ended up being a minor inconvenience though. Lee had to try and get more photos taken because "there were shadows in the eyes or uneven lighting," the NZ passport office told him.

"So I took a couple more at the post office and fortunately one of them went through," he said.

Just another one of those Asian problems, it seems.

[H/T Pedestrian.TV]