Spy cameras captured photos of 1,700 unwitting students on a Colorado campus as part of facial recognition study funded by the U.S. government, report reveals
- Nearly 2,000 students were swept up in the study without their knowledge
- A database was created to train an algorithm how to recognize obscured faces
- The database was public from 2016 until April and was eventually taken down
- Other companies and entities have used similar methods to train AI
More than 1,700 people people on a University of Colorado campus were unknowingly photographed as part of a facial recognition project funded by the U.S government.
The study, originally carried out between 2012 and 2013 has been highlighted by several recent reports and raises ethical questions about researchers' methods, particularly the lack of consents from the project's subjects.
Using a long-range surveillance camera to peer out of an office window at a campus in Colorado Springs, the study's author, Dr. Terrance Boult, captured more than 16,000 images of students, professors, and others during a period in 2012 and 2013.
To help research facial recognition software the U.S. military funded research that recorded 1,700 subjects on a Colorado campus without their knowledge. Stock image
The images, says Boult, formed the basis for a data set called 'Unconstrained College Students' which would be used to test the ability of a facial recognition algorithm to identify people in murky conditions -- many of the subjects swept up in the images were in less-than-ideal lighting and sometimes looking away or even down at their phones.
Feasibly, this type of data would be useful the U.S. military and intelligence in helping to design facial recognition that can be used in reconnaissance or even more acute domestic surveillance.
The database was made available to the public in 2016 but was eventually taken down this April according to the Denver Post.
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While none of the people captured by the camera's recordings were named and entities using the database were required to sign a legal agreement saying that they would not release any photos according to the Colorado Springs Independent, the research has still given rise to ethical questions.
'It’s yet another area where we’re seeing privacy intrusions that disturb us,' said Bernard Chao, a privacy expert at Denver University who was interview by the Denver Post.
The study by Boult is one many recent examples in which entities and corporations have used iamges of people to train facial recognition software without their consent.
Among the chief concerns from skeptics of facial recognition software is that it may violate people's privacy and give way to a culture of mass surveillance. Stock image
In a report from NBC News, the outlet revealed that cloud-based photo company, Ever used millions of users' photos to train a facial recognition algorithm being licensed for use by one of its corporate arms, Ever AI.
Likewise, IBM used millions of photos sourced from photo-sharing website Flickr to train its own facial recognition software.
Ethical question over the methods used to train advanced facial recognition software seem to mirror an increasing skepticism about the systems as a whole.
Amazon recently killed an initiative to stop selling its facial recognition software, Rekognition, over concerns from some shareholders that it may be misused or sold to dubious governments while San Francisco became the first city in the U.S. to ban its use by law enforcement and other public agencies citing concerns over privacy and first amendment rights.
HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK?
Facial recognition software works by matching real time images to a previous photograph of a person.
Each face has approximately 80 unique nodal points across the eyes, nose, cheeky and mouth which distinguish one person from another.
A digital video camera measures the distance between various points on the human face, such as the width of the nose, depth of the eye sockets, distance between the eyes and shape of the jawline.
A different smart surveillance system (pictured) can scan 2 billion faces within seconds has been revealed in China. The system connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to pick out targets. The military is working on applying a similar version of this with AI to track people across the country
This produces a unique numerical code that can then be linked with a matching code gleaned from a previous photograph.
A facial recognition system used by officials in China connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to pick out targets.
Experts believe that facial recognition technology will soon overtake fingerprint technology as the most effective way to identify people.
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