About MegaPixels

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 of their algorithms. Today, these datasets no longer originate in labs, but instead from family photos albums posted on Flickr, CCTV cameras on college campuses, livestreams at cafes, search engine queries for celebrities, or videos on YouTube.

While these datasets include many public figures, politicans, athletes, and actors, they also include many non-public figures including digital activists, students, and pedestrians. Some images are used with creative commons licenses, but others were taken in unconstrained scenarios without anyone's awareness or consent. During the last year hundreds of these datasets have been collected to understand how they contribute to a global data supply chain powering surveillance.

MegaPixels is art and research by Adam Harvey about publicly available facial recognition datasets that aims to unravel the stories behind these datasets. During 2019 this site, coded by Jules LaPlace, will publish reserach reports, visualizations, tools for searching the datasets, and statistics about each datset for others to download.

This project is produced in partnership with Mozilla who has provided the funding to research the datasets, build the site, and develop tools to help you understand the role that these datasets have played in creating surveillance technologies.

Team

Adam Harvey is Berlin-based American artist and researcher. His previous projects (CV Dazzle, Stealth Wear, and 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 a researcher in residence at Karlsruhe HfG.

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.