Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped without consent

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People's faces are being used without their permission to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say.

Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores.

That's a particular concern for minorities who could be profiled and targeted, the experts and advocates say. "None of the people I photographed had any idea their images were being used in this way," said Greg Peverill-Conti, a Boston-based public relations executive who has more than 700 photos in IBM's collection, known as a"training dataset."

IBM says that its dataset is designed to help academic researchers make facial recognition technology fairer. The company is not alone in using publicly available photos on the internet in this way. Dozens of other research organizations have collected photos for training facial recognition systems, and many of the larger, more recent collections have been scraped from the web.

With the rise of the web during the 2000s, researchers suddenly had access to millions of photos of people. To build its Diversity in Faces dataset, IBM says it drew upon a collection of 100 million images published with Creative Commons licenses that Flickr's owner, Yahoo, released as a batch for researchers to download in 2014.

For example, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the company sold technology to the New York City police department that allowed it to search CCTV feeds for people with particular skin tones or hair color. IBM has also released an "intelligent video analytics" productthat uses body camera surveillance to detect people by"ethnicity" tags, such as Asian, black or white.

IBM said both in public statements and directly to NBC News that the Diversity in Faces dataset is purely for academic research and won't be used to improve the company's commercial facial recognition tools.

Even when algorithms are developed by academic researchers using noncommercial datasets, those algorithms are often later used by businesses, said Brian Brackeen, CEO of the facial recognition company Kairos. "Since I assume that IBM is not a charitable organization and at the end of the day wants to make money with this technology, this is clearly a commercial use," he said.

Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)

 

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Something posted online public doesn’t actually need consent if I understand it correctly. You are essentially giving consent by posting it publicly unless there is some kind of disclaimer or trademark marking.

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