------------

status: published
title: About MegaPixels
desc: About MegaPixels
slug: about
cssclass: about
published: 2018-12-04
updated: 2018-12-04
authors: Adam Harvey

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# About MegaPixels

<section class="about-menu">
<ul>
<li><a class="current" href="/about/">About</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/press/">Press</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/disclaimer/">Disclaimer</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/terms/">Terms and Conditions</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/privacy/">Privacy Policy</a></li>
</ul>
</section>

(PAGE UNDER DEVELOPMENT)

<p><div style="font-size:20px;line-height:36px">Ever since government agencies began developing face recognition in the early 1960's, datasets of face images have always been central to the development and evaluation face recognition technology. Today, these datasets no longer originate in labs, but instead from family photo albums posted on social media sites, CCTV camera footage from college campuses, search engine queries for celebrities, cafe livestreams, or <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/22/16180080/transgender-youtubers-ai-facial-recognition-dataset">videos on YouTube</a>. </div></p>

While many of these datasets include public figures such as politicans, athletes, and actors; they also include many non-public figures including digital activists, students, pedestrians, and people's semi-private shared photo albums. Some images are used with creative commons licenses, yet others were taken in unconstrained scenarios without awareness or consent. At first glance it appears many of the datasets were created for seemingly harmless academic research studies, but when examined further it becomes clear that they're also used by defense contractors in foreign countries. 

During the last year, hundreds of these facial analysis datasets created "in the wild" have been collected to understand how they contribute to a global supply chain of biometric data that is helping to power the global facial recognition industry.

MegaPixels is art and research by <a href="https://ahprojects.com">Adam Harvey</a> about publicly available facial recognition datasets that aims to unravel their histories, futures, geographies, and contents. Throughout 2019 this site, coded by Jules LaPlace, will publish research reports, visualizations, downloadable statistics, and interactive tools for searching the datasets.

The MegaPixels website is produced in partnership with [Mozilla](https://mozilla.org) who provided the funding to research the datasets, build the site, and develop tools to help you understand the role these datasets have played in creating biometric surveillance technologies. 

The MegaPixels site is based on an [earlier installation](https://ahprojects.com/megapixels-glassroom), also supported by Mozilla, at the [Tactical Tech Glassroom](https://theglassroom.org/) in London about the facial recognition datasets; and a commission from the Elevate arts festival curated by Berit Gilma about pedestrian recognition datasets.


### MegaPixels Team

![sideimage:Adam Harvey](assets/adam-harvey-3d.jpg) **Adam Harvey** is Berlin-based American artist and researcher. His previous projects ([CV Dazzle](https://ahprojects.com/cvdazzle), [Stealth Wear](https://ahprojects.com/stealth-wear), and [SkyLift](https://ahprojects.com/skylift)) explore the potential for countersurveillance as artwork. He is the founder of VFRAME (visual forensics software for human rights groups), the recipient of 2 PrototypeFund awards, and is a researcher in residence at Karlsruhe HfG. <br>[ahprojects.com](https://ahprojects.com)

![sideimage:Jules LaPlace](assets/jules-laplace-3d.jpg)**Jules LaPlace** is an American creative technologist also based in Berlin. He was previously the CTO of a digital agency in NYC and now also works at VFRAME, developing computer vision for human rights groups. Jules also builds creative software for artists and musicians.<br>[asdf.us](https://asdf.us)


### Additional Researchers

Additional research by Berit Gilma.