AI & Surveillance | The Ethical Dilemma of Facial Recognition Software
AI & Surveillance | The Ethical Dilemma of Facial Recognition Software
Vicar Sayeedi
April 13, 2021
For some years now, the West has been shocked by a steady stream of news reports detailing the incarceration of some 1.5 million Uighur and other Turkic People from Xinjiang Province in Northwest China. In light of historical events in Europe during the mid-20th century, news of the fate of so many Uighur People has been viewed with alarm and disbelief across the West and has formally been labeled as an act of genocide by governments in several leading Western capitals, including Washington. But what has not been understood by most is the technology that has enabled the Chinese State to identify and track the Uighur people: it is facial recognition software enabled by Artificial Intelligence that can uniquely identify Uighur faces amongst all others.
Today, many in the Western scientific community involved in the development of surveillance technologies such as AI-enabled facial recognition are concerned that some of their colleagues have been working to develop these incontrovertibly dangerous machine-learning algorithms in an unregulated and unethical manner. They are also worried that a number of important academic, scientific and technical journals have published peer-reviewed research papers describing the implementation of facial recognition technology to identify Uighurs along with members of other Chinese minority groups. Their complaints have resulted in a number of investigations as academics and human rights activists try to cajole the wider scientific community to take a principled stand against the unethical use of facial-recognition research and development. The activists are denouncing the controversial use of such powerful technology, along with the ethically weak basis of so much of the research in this discipline.
A growing number of scientists have been trying to convince their research colleagues to avoid working with academic institutions or companies linked to unethical projects and to more carefully consider how they are collecting and sharing facial-recognition datasets. Many of these studies have collected staggeringly large datasets of images of people’s faces without consent and some of these datasets have now helped train AI-enabled commercial and military surveillance algorithms. Activists in the scientific community want researchers to be more thoughtful about the ethical basis of their work. Some progress is being made as a few academic conferences and a number of journals are increasing scrutiny of the studies they publish, while some in the facial recognition technology community have begun to believe that it’s just too difficult to do ethically acceptable work in this field, at all.
For today’s facial-recognition algorithms to work well, they must be trained and then tested on very large sets of images that are being collected, often without consent. In 2015, scientists at Stanford University published a set of 12,000 images captured from a webcam in a San Francisco café. In 2016, researchers at Duke University released more than two million photos of students walking on the university campus. But the largest datasets of images have been collected online. In 2016, facial recognition researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle uploaded a database called MegaFace which contained over three million photos collected from the image-sharing site Flickr, while research scientists at Microsoft Research published the world’s largest data set, MSCeleb, consisting of ten million images of about 100,000 unique individuals from across society including photos of leading academics, journalists and performers that they’d scraped from the Internet. These datasets have since been used to test and improve various surveillance products including military surveillance systems in China. We now realize that many of the photos people unwittingly post online are eventually used as training data for AI-enabled surveillance systems.
Some of these datasets have now been removed from the Internet but not before they have served their [often nefarious] purpose. Other large online image collections, such as the one from Microsoft, continue to be circulated amongst researchers, who continue to cite them in their research and even to upload them, or some version of them. The researchers occasionally stipulate that these datasets should be used only for the purposes of scientific research; however, once these datasets have been widely distributed, it is no longer possible to prevent for-profit enterprises from acquiring them for commercial use.
It is not yet clear whether scientists in Europe can collect photos of people’s faces for biometric research without explicit consent. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] does not provide any legal basis for researchers to do this, but there hasn’t been any official EU guidance on how to interpret GDPR regarding this issue and it has yet to be tested in court. In the United States, some states say it is illegal for commercial enterprises to use a person’s biometric data without their consent. Illinois has gone further and said that individuals are allowed to sue in these cases. As a result, several firms have been hit with class-action lawsuits.
Last year, Facebook agreed to pay $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in Illinois over a private collection of photos that it improperly used for facial recognition. The New York company, Clearview AI scraped three billion online photos for its facial-recognition system and has now also been sued for violating Illinois law in several pending cases. Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have also been sued in Illinois for using a data set of nearly one million online photos released by IBM in 2019.
In summary, the entire enterprise of AI-enabled facial recognition is fraught with ethical challenges and although it can serve very valuable purposes in society including in medical research, public health and law enforcement, its nefarious dimension requires very proactive and thoughtful regulation.
Vicar Sayeedi is a Computer Scientist and Engineer, a Lecturer and a Consultant. Vicar is also the author of several books. His most recent book is about Artificial Intelligence and is titled, The Génome Affair.
Vicar is most interested in the big questions facing humankind. He is particularly focused on studying at the confluence of the five great disciplines of Human History, Political Science and Thought, International Affairs, Science and Technology. This intersection offers a deep understanding and pedagogically important lessons of how advances in human endeavor have influenced and impacted civilization.
Vicar has been writing books, essays and poetry for many years. For the past 30 years, Vicar has worked in the Technology and Pharmaceutical industries. He is currently a Consultant in the Life Sciences Industry and lives in suburban Chicago with his wife and their three grown children [if they decide to visit during the holidays!]
You can find Vicar’s recent book on AI, The Génome Affair on Amazon at this link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YQ7M9Q7
The most recent episodes of Vicar’s ai & u! Podcast are on YouTube at the following links:
Episode 1 - https://youtu.be/yNYr28jtY_k
What is Artificial Intelligence? What is Human Intelligence?
Episode 2 - https://youtu.be/kAEgDNh1Nwc
How Did We Get Here? Machine Learning, Neural Networks & the AI Lexicon, Exciting AI Agents
Episode 3 - https://youtu.be/3PYCyv1pCgM
Deep Mind - How Powerful is Narrow AI? State Surveillance and Surveillance Capitalism
Episode 4 - https://youtu.be/WvobCMIM_H4
Impact on Societies That Possess Artificial Intelligence Versus Those that Do Not!
Episode 5 - https://youtu.be/4JVpvm4g79g
Surveillance Capitalism, Surveillance State, 4th Industrial Revolution, Bifurcation of Sapiens
Episode 6 - https://youtu.be/e1q2GgcWQok
AI, Blockchain & Quantum Computing - Implications for Global and National Governance
Episode 7 - https://youtu.be/4bDSUvrOdd4
Popular Perceptions of Intelligence, the Seat of Human Intelligence and Implications for AI
Episode 8 - https://youtu.be/3GjHqQZL7Pk
AI - Why Should I care? Plus Exciting Updates from Elon Musk and Neuralink!
Episode 9 - https://youtu.be/enpecqDecC8
AI - Excellence, Innovation & Genius
Episode 10 - https://youtu.be/UsriESlTjdA
Implications for AI as China and the West Decouple
Episode 11 - https://youtu.be/0CpaMb-yw3g
Artificial Intelligence: Ethics, Law & Society
Episode 12 - https://youtu.be/PLzodrLWMq0
AI & Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems
Episode 13 - https://youtu.be/Lm_nrNyJRbA
AI & the Future of Work in Industry 4.0 – the 4th Industrial Revolution
Episode 14 - https://youtu.be/_3E1Mhr_Dt8
Artificial Intelligence and its Implications for Authoritarianism and Democracy
Episode 15 - https://youtu.be/IpMUqHOEd7w
Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness & the Future of Homo Sapiens
Episode 16 - https://youtu.be/mIf7_VMzGKo
AI and its Implications for America's Political Environment
Episode 17 - https://youtu.be/gsMRPnovZGI
Special Episode: Reading From The Génome Affair
Episode 18 - https://youtu.be/UxNxtWDCREM
Artificial Intelligence - Digital Tyranny, Datocracy and the Imitation Game
Episode 19 - https://youtu.be/Db8U0QQWWuY
Does Artificial Intelligence Really Replicate Human Intelligence?
Episode 20 - https://youtu.be/Np18AEq-6DM
AI & Rising Geopolitical Tensions Between China & The West
Episode 21 - https://youtu.be/fOMSvNiixA0
AI & In-vitro Fertilization [IVF]
Episode 22 - https://youtu.be/EQPpRhIV6Kw
AI & Human Intelligence: A Complex Relationship
Episode 23 - https://youtu.be/EAbQ7stY7JQ
AI Upends the World of Structural Biology
Episode 24 - https://youtu.be/Bsb1F8uoBpA
AI & COVID-19: An Extraordinary Contribution
Episode 25 - https://youtu.be/PqL5PCRc8tA
AI, Connectomics & Transhumanism: the Future of Humankind
Episode 26 - https://youtu.be/HI8Zjl8VM8U
Dramatic Upheaval Inside Google's Ethical AI Team
Episode 27 - https://youtu.be/TqWwJYc2GxQ
AI & Cyber Espionage | How Will the Sunburst Attack Affect Our Security?
Episode 28 - https://youtu.be/89BcThqgcfQ
AI & the Rapidly Escalating Threat from Deep Fake Videos
Episode 29 - https://youtu.be/zvOHRMmJNB4
AI, Facial Recognition Technology & The Digital Surveillance State
Episode 30 - https://youtu.be/br4ygfEWdk0
AI & Social Media | The Most Destructive AI We've Ever Seen?
Episode 31 - https://youtu.be/sOy12ii8zwM
The Democratization of AI & The 2021 Maiflower Expedition | Plymouth, England to Plymouth, MA
Episode 32 - https://youtu.be/bixdLL74reE
Sino-American Cold War | A Blessing in Disguise for America?
Episode 33 - https://youtu.be/tTRm312DgMc
AI & the Tyranny of Meritocracy
Episode 34 - https://youtu.be/FpPzC5VP6GM
In the Midst of Chaos and Pandemic | A Big AI Announcement From the Trump Administration
Episode 35 - https://youtu.be/bK3xCBwrG8w
Artificial Super Intelligence – Can We Control It?
Episode 36 - https://youtu.be/Rc60DQ0L86Q
A New America | Hope with a Big Dose of Caution
Episode 37 - https://youtu.be/UBenYYHbYqM
Will AI [Science & Tech] Benefit From a New Cold War with China?
Episode 38 - https://youtu.be/JewJnPywnOU
Will AI Eventually Replace All Other Forms of Government?
Episode 39 - https://youtu.be/ibuJ8vozyqg
Will AI Perpetuate Bias in Employment, Health Systems, Law and Society?
Episode 40 - https://youtu.be/IJYbPfGC-08
AI | Will it be the Bain of Cyber Criminals?
Episode 41 - https://youtu.be/ozrO5_XTYKQ
AI | What Will it Mean for the Future of Work?
Episode 42 - https://youtu.be/kDKapDK-Vb0
AI | A Harbinger for the End of Democracy?
Episode 43 - https://youtu.be/7XeNyE8CA9I
AI & the Life Sciences | Developments in Connectomics & Radiology
Episode 44 - https://youtu.be/mWaPW_UolVo
AI & Geopolitics | Critical Strategic Planning in the Age of China
Episode 45 - https://youtu.be/qOSOc3vJRBk
AI & Humankind | What Might the Future Hold?
Episode 46 - https://youtu.be/atMSV1WAFkg
AI Enabled Surveillance | An Important Tool to Contain Dangerous Personality Traits?
Episode 47 - https://youtu.be/kz7-EDmlGXc
Will AI Favor Authoritarianism or Democracy?
Episode 48 - https://youtu.be/uTvKWQgdOaI
AI | A Key Enabler of Universal Basic Income?
Episode 49 - https://youtu.be/sy48Xqo-3qM
AI & The Future of Government, Industry, Markets &Trade
Episode 50 - https://youtu.be/JU1oGzb5TS0
AI & Surveillance | America’s New Strategy in the Middle East
Episode 51 - https://youtu.be/nOCQjUxLWJY
AI-Enabled Global Government | An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
Episode 52 - https://youtu.be/g1VJqiI3HyE
AI & Healthcare | What Will the Future Look Like? Will it be More Equitable?
Episode 53 - https://youtu.be/ie9KAg_kF7Q
AI & Surveillance | The Ethical Dilemma of Facial Recognition Software
Vicar Sayeedi
April 13, 2021
For some years now, the West has been shocked by a steady stream of news reports detailing the incarceration of some 1.5 million Uighur and other Turkic People from Xinjiang Province in Northwest China. In light of historical events in Europe during the mid-20th century, news of the fate of so many Uighur People has been viewed with alarm and disbelief across the West and has formally been labeled as an act of genocide by governments in several leading Western capitals, including Washington. But what has not been understood by most is the technology that has enabled the Chinese State to identify and track the Uighur people: it is facial recognition software enabled by Artificial Intelligence that can uniquely identify Uighur faces amongst all others.
Today, many in the Western scientific community involved in the development of surveillance technologies such as AI-enabled facial recognition are concerned that some of their colleagues have been working to develop these incontrovertibly dangerous machine-learning algorithms in an unregulated and unethical manner. They are also worried that a number of important academic, scientific and technical journals have published peer-reviewed research papers describing the implementation of facial recognition technology to identify Uighurs along with members of other Chinese minority groups. Their complaints have resulted in a number of investigations as academics and human rights activists try to cajole the wider scientific community to take a principled stand against the unethical use of facial-recognition research and development. The activists are denouncing the controversial use of such powerful technology, along with the ethically weak basis of so much of the research in this discipline.
A growing number of scientists have been trying to convince their research colleagues to avoid working with academic institutions or companies linked to unethical projects and to more carefully consider how they are collecting and sharing facial-recognition datasets. Many of these studies have collected staggeringly large datasets of images of people’s faces without consent and some of these datasets have now helped train AI-enabled commercial and military surveillance algorithms. Activists in the scientific community want researchers to be more thoughtful about the ethical basis of their work. Some progress is being made as a few academic conferences and a number of journals are increasing scrutiny of the studies they publish, while some in the facial recognition technology community have begun to believe that it’s just too difficult to do ethically acceptable work in this field, at all.
For today’s facial-recognition algorithms to work well, they must be trained and then tested on very large sets of images that are being collected, often without consent. In 2015, scientists at Stanford University published a set of 12,000 images captured from a webcam in a San Francisco café. In 2016, researchers at Duke University released more than two million photos of students walking on the university campus. But the largest datasets of images have been collected online. In 2016, facial recognition researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle uploaded a database called MegaFace which contained over three million photos collected from the image-sharing site Flickr, while research scientists at Microsoft Research published the world’s largest data set, MSCeleb, consisting of ten million images of about 100,000 unique individuals from across society including photos of leading academics, journalists and performers that they’d scraped from the Internet. These datasets have since been used to test and improve various surveillance products including military surveillance systems in China. We now realize that many of the photos people unwittingly post online are eventually used as training data for AI-enabled surveillance systems.
Some of these datasets have now been removed from the Internet but not before they have served their [often nefarious] purpose. Other large online image collections, such as the one from Microsoft, continue to be circulated amongst researchers, who continue to cite them in their research and even to upload them, or some version of them. The researchers occasionally stipulate that these datasets should be used only for the purposes of scientific research; however, once these datasets have been widely distributed, it is no longer possible to prevent for-profit enterprises from acquiring them for commercial use.
It is not yet clear whether scientists in Europe can collect photos of people’s faces for biometric research without explicit consent. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] does not provide any legal basis for researchers to do this, but there hasn’t been any official EU guidance on how to interpret GDPR regarding this issue and it has yet to be tested in court. In the United States, some states say it is illegal for commercial enterprises to use a person’s biometric data without their consent. Illinois has gone further and said that individuals are allowed to sue in these cases. As a result, several firms have been hit with class-action lawsuits.
Last year, Facebook agreed to pay $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in Illinois over a private collection of photos that it improperly used for facial recognition. The New York company, Clearview AI scraped three billion online photos for its facial-recognition system and has now also been sued for violating Illinois law in several pending cases. Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have also been sued in Illinois for using a data set of nearly one million online photos released by IBM in 2019.
In summary, the entire enterprise of AI-enabled facial recognition is fraught with ethical challenges and although it can serve very valuable purposes in society including in medical research, public health and law enforcement, its nefarious dimension requires very proactive and thoughtful regulation.
Vicar Sayeedi is a Computer Scientist and Engineer, a Lecturer and a Consultant. Vicar is also the author of several books. His most recent book is about Artificial Intelligence and is titled, The Génome Affair.
Vicar is most interested in the big questions facing humankind. He is particularly focused on studying at the confluence of the five great disciplines of Human History, Political Science and Thought, International Affairs, Science and Technology. This intersection offers a deep understanding and pedagogically important lessons of how advances in human endeavor have influenced and impacted civilization.
Vicar has been writing books, essays and poetry for many years. For the past 30 years, Vicar has worked in the Technology and Pharmaceutical industries. He is currently a Consultant in the Life Sciences Industry and lives in suburban Chicago with his wife and their three grown children [if they decide to visit during the holidays!]
You can find Vicar’s recent book on AI, The Génome Affair on Amazon at this link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YQ7M9Q7
The most recent episodes of Vicar’s ai & u! Podcast are on YouTube at the following links:
Episode 1 - https://youtu.be/yNYr28jtY_k
What is Artificial Intelligence? What is Human Intelligence?
Episode 2 - https://youtu.be/kAEgDNh1Nwc
How Did We Get Here? Machine Learning, Neural Networks & the AI Lexicon, Exciting AI Agents
Episode 3 - https://youtu.be/3PYCyv1pCgM
Deep Mind - How Powerful is Narrow AI? State Surveillance and Surveillance Capitalism
Episode 4 - https://youtu.be/WvobCMIM_H4
Impact on Societies That Possess Artificial Intelligence Versus Those that Do Not!
Episode 5 - https://youtu.be/4JVpvm4g79g
Surveillance Capitalism, Surveillance State, 4th Industrial Revolution, Bifurcation of Sapiens
Episode 6 - https://youtu.be/e1q2GgcWQok
AI, Blockchain & Quantum Computing - Implications for Global and National Governance
Episode 7 - https://youtu.be/4bDSUvrOdd4
Popular Perceptions of Intelligence, the Seat of Human Intelligence and Implications for AI
Episode 8 - https://youtu.be/3GjHqQZL7Pk
AI - Why Should I care? Plus Exciting Updates from Elon Musk and Neuralink!
Episode 9 - https://youtu.be/enpecqDecC8
AI - Excellence, Innovation & Genius
Episode 10 - https://youtu.be/UsriESlTjdA
Implications for AI as China and the West Decouple
Episode 11 - https://youtu.be/0CpaMb-yw3g
Artificial Intelligence: Ethics, Law & Society
Episode 12 - https://youtu.be/PLzodrLWMq0
AI & Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems
Episode 13 - https://youtu.be/Lm_nrNyJRbA
AI & the Future of Work in Industry 4.0 – the 4th Industrial Revolution
Episode 14 - https://youtu.be/_3E1Mhr_Dt8
Artificial Intelligence and its Implications for Authoritarianism and Democracy
Episode 15 - https://youtu.be/IpMUqHOEd7w
Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness & the Future of Homo Sapiens
Episode 16 - https://youtu.be/mIf7_VMzGKo
AI and its Implications for America's Political Environment
Episode 17 - https://youtu.be/gsMRPnovZGI
Special Episode: Reading From The Génome Affair
Episode 18 - https://youtu.be/UxNxtWDCREM
Artificial Intelligence - Digital Tyranny, Datocracy and the Imitation Game
Episode 19 - https://youtu.be/Db8U0QQWWuY
Does Artificial Intelligence Really Replicate Human Intelligence?
Episode 20 - https://youtu.be/Np18AEq-6DM
AI & Rising Geopolitical Tensions Between China & The West
Episode 21 - https://youtu.be/fOMSvNiixA0
AI & In-vitro Fertilization [IVF]
Episode 22 - https://youtu.be/EQPpRhIV6Kw
AI & Human Intelligence: A Complex Relationship
Episode 23 - https://youtu.be/EAbQ7stY7JQ
AI Upends the World of Structural Biology
Episode 24 - https://youtu.be/Bsb1F8uoBpA
AI & COVID-19: An Extraordinary Contribution
Episode 25 - https://youtu.be/PqL5PCRc8tA
AI, Connectomics & Transhumanism: the Future of Humankind
Episode 26 - https://youtu.be/HI8Zjl8VM8U
Dramatic Upheaval Inside Google's Ethical AI Team
Episode 27 - https://youtu.be/TqWwJYc2GxQ
AI & Cyber Espionage | How Will the Sunburst Attack Affect Our Security?
Episode 28 - https://youtu.be/89BcThqgcfQ
AI & the Rapidly Escalating Threat from Deep Fake Videos
Episode 29 - https://youtu.be/zvOHRMmJNB4
AI, Facial Recognition Technology & The Digital Surveillance State
Episode 30 - https://youtu.be/br4ygfEWdk0
AI & Social Media | The Most Destructive AI We've Ever Seen?
Episode 31 - https://youtu.be/sOy12ii8zwM
The Democratization of AI & The 2021 Maiflower Expedition | Plymouth, England to Plymouth, MA
Episode 32 - https://youtu.be/bixdLL74reE
Sino-American Cold War | A Blessing in Disguise for America?
Episode 33 - https://youtu.be/tTRm312DgMc
AI & the Tyranny of Meritocracy
Episode 34 - https://youtu.be/FpPzC5VP6GM
In the Midst of Chaos and Pandemic | A Big AI Announcement From the Trump Administration
Episode 35 - https://youtu.be/bK3xCBwrG8w
Artificial Super Intelligence – Can We Control It?
Episode 36 - https://youtu.be/Rc60DQ0L86Q
A New America | Hope with a Big Dose of Caution
Episode 37 - https://youtu.be/UBenYYHbYqM
Will AI [Science & Tech] Benefit From a New Cold War with China?
Episode 38 - https://youtu.be/JewJnPywnOU
Will AI Eventually Replace All Other Forms of Government?
Episode 39 - https://youtu.be/ibuJ8vozyqg
Will AI Perpetuate Bias in Employment, Health Systems, Law and Society?
Episode 40 - https://youtu.be/IJYbPfGC-08
AI | Will it be the Bain of Cyber Criminals?
Episode 41 - https://youtu.be/ozrO5_XTYKQ
AI | What Will it Mean for the Future of Work?
Episode 42 - https://youtu.be/kDKapDK-Vb0
AI | A Harbinger for the End of Democracy?
Episode 43 - https://youtu.be/7XeNyE8CA9I
AI & the Life Sciences | Developments in Connectomics & Radiology
Episode 44 - https://youtu.be/mWaPW_UolVo
AI & Geopolitics | Critical Strategic Planning in the Age of China
Episode 45 - https://youtu.be/qOSOc3vJRBk
AI & Humankind | What Might the Future Hold?
Episode 46 - https://youtu.be/atMSV1WAFkg
AI Enabled Surveillance | An Important Tool to Contain Dangerous Personality Traits?
Episode 47 - https://youtu.be/kz7-EDmlGXc
Will AI Favor Authoritarianism or Democracy?
Episode 48 - https://youtu.be/uTvKWQgdOaI
AI | A Key Enabler of Universal Basic Income?
Episode 49 - https://youtu.be/sy48Xqo-3qM
AI & The Future of Government, Industry, Markets &Trade
Episode 50 - https://youtu.be/JU1oGzb5TS0
AI & Surveillance | America’s New Strategy in the Middle East
Episode 51 - https://youtu.be/nOCQjUxLWJY
AI-Enabled Global Government | An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
Episode 52 - https://youtu.be/g1VJqiI3HyE
AI & Healthcare | What Will the Future Look Like? Will it be More Equitable?
Episode 53 - https://youtu.be/ie9KAg_kF7Q
AI & Surveillance | The Ethical Dilemma of Facial Recognition Software
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