News

Since launching MegaPixels in April 2019, several of the datasets mentioned have disappeared and one surveillance workshop was canceled (then uncanceled).B elow is a timeline of events, responses, reactions, and press:

June 2019

June 24: Les Echos (FR) writes about MS Celeb dataset and Le mariage explosif de nos données et de l'IA (The explosive combination of our data and AI)
June 22: La Stamp (Italy) writes about Microsoft's removal of the MS Celeb dataset
June 15: De Tijd (Belgium) writes about Brainwash head dataset
June 13: Creator of Duke MTMC dataset apologizes to students recorded for surveillance research to student body and university: "I take full responsibility for my mistakes, and I apologize to all people who were recorded and to Duke for their consequences"
Jun 12: Duke Chronicle, Duke University's student paper, investigates Duke MTMC dataset, confirms it violated IRB: "A Duke study recorded thousands of students’ faces. Now they’re being used all over the world"
June 7: Additional coverage of FT's story by BBC, Spiegel.de, IrishTimes, and Gizmodo
June 6: Financial Times covers the abrupt disappearance of four facial recognition datasets: Microsoft quietly deletes largest public face recognition data set by Madhumita Murgia
June 2: A person tracking surveillance workshop at CVPR (reid-mct.github.io/2019) has been canceled due to the Duke MTMC dataset no longer being available: "Due to some unforeseen circumstances, the test data has not been available. The multi-target multi-camera tracking and person re-identification challenge is canceled. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused."
June 2: The Duke MTMC dataset website (vision.cs.duke.edu/DukeMTMC) has abruptly gone blank. An archive from April 18 is still available on the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org/web/20190418085103/http://vision.cs.duke.edu/DukeMTMC/)
June 1: The Brainwash face/head dataset has been taken down by its author at 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. This site never mentioned that he did provide data to government agencies, only that his work benefited their objectives.

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 the references section on Semantic Scholar pages)
May 28: The Microsoft Celeb (MS-Celeb-1M) face dataset website is now 404 and all the download links were deactivated. It appears that someone at Microsoft Research has shuttered access to the 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: Stories about the UnConstrained College Students Dataset appeared 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: Denver Post writes about the UCCS dataset: CU Colorado Springs students secretly photographed for government-backed facial-recognition research
May 22, 2019: Interview with CS Indy about the UCCS dataset 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