Press

Since launching MegaPixels in April 2019, several of the datasets mentioned have disappeared and one surveillance workshop was canceled. Below is a list of responses, reactions, and press:

June 2019

• June 2: A person tracking surveillance workshop at CVPR has been canceled due to the Duke MTMC dataset no longer being available https://reid-mct.github.io/2019/
• June 2: The Duke MTMC dataset website (http://vision.cs.duke.edu/DukeMTMC/) has mysteriously disappeared without any reason provided
• June 1: The Brainwash face/head dataset has been taken down by its author https://exhibits.stanford.edu/data/catalog/sx925dc9385. "This data was removed from access at the request of the depositor."
• June 1: The UCCS dataset page has been updated with a response from the author to clarify that he did not provide any face data to government agencies. Funding was for technology transfer.

May 2019

• May 31: Semantic Scholar appears to be censoring citations used in this project. Two of the citations linking the Brainwash dataset to research from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China have disabled. NUDT citation 1, NUDT citation 2, and the original paper show that the NUDT citation has been censored (see references)
• May 28: The Microsoft Celeb (MS-Celeb-1M) face dataset website is now 404 and all the download links were deactivated. It appears that Microsoft Research has shuttered access to their MS Celeb dataset. Yet it remains available, as of writing this, on Imperial College London's website and on https://msropendata.com/datasets/98fdfc70-85ee-5288-a69f-d859bbe9c737
• May 29, 2019: UnConstrained College Students Dataset on Engadget, AP News, New York Times, US News, Daily Dot, Washington Post, MSN, International Association of Privacy Professionals, The Denver Channel, Daily Mail, New York Post, Yahoo! News
• May 27, 2019: CU Colorado Springs students secretly photographed for government-backed facial-recognition research
• May 22, 2019: UCCS secretly photographed students to advance facial recognition technology by J. Adrian Stanley

April, 2019

• April 20: Washington Post Editorial Board responds to Financial Times article based on data surfaced in MegaPixels project: Opinion | Microsoft worked with a Chinese military university on AI. Does that make sense?
• April 19: Financial Times feature on MegaPixels project: Who's Using Your Face by Madhumita Murgia
• April 19: MegaPixels data cited by report in Financial Times: Western AI researchers partnered with Chinese surveillance firm by Madhumita Murgia
• April 10: Microsoft worked with Chinese military university on artificial intelligence based on data surfaced in MS Celeb dataset

2018

• Aug 22: HRT Transgender dataset on Verge.com: Transgender YouTubers had their videos grabbed to train facial recognition software by James Vincent