Facial Recognition Tech Is Built on Non-Consensual Personal Data: Study

"Biometrics" refers to the measurement and sorting of biological identifiers like your gait or DNA. The technology lets you mindlessly unlock your iPhone—and it also lets the government spot you in a crowded airport.

You already know facial recognition is a controversial biometric. Now, there’s another twist: The technology is built on a bedrock of personal data obtained without consent, per MIT Tech Review’s write-up of a new study, the largest review of facial recognition to date.

How it happened: A timeline

Researchers dug through 130+ facial recognition datasets across 43 years. Let’s break down the developments by decade:

• ’60s–’90s: In the beginning, there were rudimentary algorithms. Their creators relied on smaller datasets and asked subjects for permission to use their faces.
• Mid-’90s: The Pentagon creates the first big-leagues face dataset, snapping 14,000+ (consensual) pics of 1,199 individuals across three years.
• The New Millennium (2007–2013): The internet’s surface area was exponentially growing. Developers could, and did, just scrape photo-sharing services for training data.
• The move-fast-and-break-things era: In 2014, Facebook trained state-of-the-art facial recognition with users’ photos (but never released the deep learning model). FB was far from the only company or research group engaged in this behavior, but it was eventually hit with a biometric data collection class-action lawsuit in Illinois—and paid out $650 million.

The technology

Deep learning was one of the biggest technology stories of the 2010s, powering all sorts of AI systems that notched superhuman benchmarks. The ingredients for DL = algorithmic innovation, more compute power, and vastly larger datasets.

• For facial recognition systems to get better, researchers fed them way more faces without necessarily asking for the subjects’ permission.
• Some datasets are so large, it would be impossible to ask for everyone’s consent.

Big picture: We’re shipping technology before working out the social implications, as smart camera deployment far outpaces law and regulation. At an individual level, it’s not clear how you could opt out of being filmed in public by government or Ring cameras.