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.
"Facial recognition is one of those things we can't uninvent, so having a reliable system is better than one that generates errors and false identifications," said Neil Moralee, a food consultant and photographer based in the U.K. who specializes in portraits. When NBC News alerted one photographer, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons, that more than 1,000 of his photos were included in IBM's dataset, he tried to opt out by sending IBM his Flickr user ID. IBM told him that none of his photos were in the dataset, according to an email viewed by NBC News.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Social media photos used without consentPeople’s faces are being used without their permission, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say.
Read more »
These Documents Reveal The Government’s Detailed Plan For Using Facial Recognition On All International Passengers In Top 20 US Airports“This is opening the door to an extraordinarily more intrusive and granular level of government control.”
Read more »
Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Social media photos used without consentPeople’s faces are being used without their permission, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say.
Read more »
‘I was humiliated’ — online dating scammers hold nude photos for ransom in ‘sextortion’Billy, a 25-year-old working in tech in New York, says he met a woman on OkCupid who soon 'sextorted' him for $800:
Read more »
These Documents Reveal The Government’s Detailed Plan For Using Facial Recognition On All International Passengers In Top 20 US Airports“This is opening the door to an extraordinarily more intrusive and granular level of government control.”
Read more »
Trump Place Sign Scraped Off Condos As Residents Reject PresidentAnother New York City apartment building has been stripped of its 'TrumpPlace' name in a revolt by residents against reminders of the president's realestate empire
Read more »
Name recognition is key and four other takeaways from our Iowa pollThe latest CNN/Des Moines Register/MediaCom 2020 Iowa poll shows former Vice President Joe Biden continuing to lead the pack with 27% and Sen. Bernie Sanders close behind with 25%. Sanders is up from our last poll, though the relative order remains the same. No other candidate reaches double-digits. But beyond these topline numbers, the poll reveals some interesting trends in the electorate.
Read more »