Smile, You’re In a Facial Recognition Study

Unbeknownst to them, 1700 students, faculty and others at the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus were photographed as part of an effort to improve facial recognition technology. Their images were posted online and available to be downloaded from 2016 until last April. The project received funding from various U.S. intelligence and military agencies, including the Office of Naval Research, Special Operations Command and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A University of Colorado professor who was in charge of the project defended it to a Colorado newspaper, claiming it was undertaken “for the greater good.” He explained that he placed a camera 150 meters away from a part of campus where passers-by would be seen and would not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Their pictures were surreptitiously taken during the spring semesters of 2012 and 2013, producing more than 16,000 images and 1,732 “unique identities.”(?) The professor said the data was ultimately taken offline, but not because of privacy concerns. “We took it off because an April article in the Financial Times gave out more information than we intended,” he explained. The study was to discover if facial recognition algorithms that it developed met the Navy’s standards. They didn’t.