Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

by Joy Buolamwini

I reached out to the Boston University Technology Law Clinic for help. They looked at the copyright laws for all the countries I targeted and assessed that as long as I did not redistribute the dataset for profit and kept its use for research purposes I should be clear and within the realm of fair use. Nevertheless, lawful use did not overcome the basic fact that I would be using images of people’s faces without their consent to do this research, unless I could somehow obtain the consent of the 1,270 individuals who would be included in the dataset. Despite my struggle with this question, other computer vision researchers I spoke to felt these questions were irrelevant. Their position was: The photos are out there, and they are photos of public officials. What is your issue? With some hesitation I proceeded. The lawful yet awful standard allows practices that have questionable ethics. Maybe we needed a higher standard than “What are my chances of getting sued?”