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<h1>00: Introduction</h1>
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<div class='gray'>Posted</div>
<div>2018-12-15</div>
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<section><div class='meta'><div><div class='gray'>Posted</div><div>Dec. 15</div></div><div><div class='gray'>Author</div><div>Adam Harvey</div></div></div><section><section><p>Facial recognition is a scam.</p>
<p>It's extractive and damaging industry that's built on the biometric backbone of the Internet.</p>
<p>During the last 20 years commericial, academic, and governmental agencies have promoted the false dream of a future with face recognition. This essay debunks the popular myth that such a thing ever existed.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as <em>face recognition</em>. For the last 20 years, government agencies, commercial organizations, and academic institutions have played the public as a fool, selling a roadmap of the future that simply does not exist. Facial recognition, as it is currently defined, promoted, and sold to the public, government, and commercial sector is a scam.</p>
<p>Committed to developing robust solutions with superhuman accuracy, the industry has repeatedly undermined itself by never actually developing anything close to "face recognition".</p>
<p>There is only biased feature vector clustering and probabilistic thresholding.</p>
<h2>If you don't have data, you don't have a product.</h2>
<p>Yesterday's <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-ai/microsoft-turned-down-facial-recognition-sales-on-human-rights-concerns-idUSKCN1RS2FV">decision</a> by Brad Smith, CEO of Microsoft, to not sell facial recognition to a US law enforcement agency is not an about face by Microsoft to become more humane, it's simply a perfect illustration of the value of training data. Without data, you don't have a product to sell. Microsoft realized that doesn't have enough training data to sell</p>
<h2>Use Your Own Biometrics First</h2>
<p>If researchers want faces, they should take selfies and create their own dataset. If researchers want images of families to build surveillance software, they should use and distibute their own family portraits.</p>
<h3>Motivation</h3>
<p>Ever since government agencies began developing face recognition in the early 1960's, datasets of face images have always been central to developing and validating face recognition technologies. Today, these datasets no longer originate in labs, but instead from family photo albums posted on photo sharing sites, surveillance 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>.</p>
<p>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 powering the global facial recognition industry.</p>
<p>While many of these datasets include public figures such as politicians, athletes, and actors; they also include many non-public figures: digital activists, students, pedestrians, and semi-private shared photo albums are all considered "in the wild" and fair game for research projects. 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, but when examined further it becomes clear that they're also used by foreign defense agencies.</p>
<p>The MegaPixels site is based on an earlier <a href="https://ahprojects.com/megapixels-glassroom">installation</a> (also supported by Mozilla) at the <a href="https://theglassroom.org/">Tactical Tech Glassroom</a> in London in 2017; and a commission from the Elevate arts festival curated by Berit Gilma about pedestrian recognition datasets in 2018, and research during <a href="https://cvdazzle.com">CV Dazzle</a> from 2010-2015. Through the many prototypes, conversations, pitches, PDFs, and false starts this project has endured during the last 5 years, it eventually evolved into something much different than originally imagined. Now, as datasets become increasingly influential in shaping the computational future, it's clear that they must be critically analyzed to understand the biases, shortcomings, funding sources, and contributions to the surveillance industry. However, it's misguided to only criticize these datasets for their flaws without also praising their contribution to society. Without publicly available facial analysis datasets there would be less public discourse, less open-source software, and less peer-reviewed research. Public datasets can indeed become a vital public good for the information economy but as this projects aims to illustrate, many ethical questions arise about consent, intellectual property, surveillance, and privacy.</p>
<!-- who provided funding to research, development this project understand the role these datasets have played in creating biometric surveillance technologies. -->
<p>Ever since the first computational facial recognition research project by the CIA in the early 1960s, data has always played a vital role in the development of our biometric future. Without facial recognition datasets there would be no facial recognition. Datasets are an indispensable part of any artificial intelligence system because, as Geoffrey Hinton points out:</p>
<blockquote><p>Our relationship to computers has changed. Instead of programming them, we now show them and they figure it out. - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyhCTvrEtE">Geoffrey Hinton</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Algorithms learn from datasets. And we program algorithms by building datasets. But datasets aren't like code. There's no programming language made of data except for the data itself.</p>
<p>Ignore content below these lines</p>
<p>It was the early 2000s. Face recognition was new and no one seemed sure exactly how well it was going to perform in practice. In theory, face recognition was poised to be a game changer, a force multiplier, a strategic military advantage, a way to make cities safer and to secure borders. This was the future John Ashcroft demanded with the Total Information Awareness act of the 2003 and that spooks had dreamed of for decades. It was a future that academics at Carnegie Mellon Universtiy and Colorado State University would help build. It was also a future that celebrities would play a significant role in building. And to the surprise of ordinary Internet users like myself and perhaps you, it was a future that millions of Internet users would unwittingly play role in creating.</p>
<p>Now the future has arrived and it doesn't make sense. Facial recognition works yet it doesn't actually work. Facial recognition is cheap and accessible but also expensive and out of control. Facial recognition research has achieved headline grabbing superhuman accuracies over 99.9% yet facial recognition is also dangerously inaccurate. During a trial installation at Sudkreuz station in Berlin in 2018, 20% of the matches were wrong, a number so low that it should not have any connection to law enforcement or justice. And in London, the Metropolitan police had been using facial recognition software that mistakenly identified an alarming 98% of people as criminals <sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-met_police"><a href="#fn-met_police">1</a></sup>, which perhaps is a crime itself.</p>
<p>MegaPixels is an online art project that explores the history of facial recognition from the perspective of datasets. To paraphrase the artist Trevor Paglen, whoever controls the dataset controls the meaning. MegaPixels aims to unravel the meanings behind the data and expose the darker corners of the biometric industry that have contributed to its growth. MegaPixels does not start with a conclusion, a moralistic slant, or a</p>
<p>Whether or not to build facial recognition was a question that can no longer be asked. As an outspoken critic of face recognition I've developed, and hopefully furthered, my understanding during the last 10 years I've spent working with computer vision. Though I initially disagreed, I've come to see technocratic perspective as a non-negotiable reality. As Oren (nytimes article) wrote in NYT Op-Ed "the horse is out of the barn" and the only thing we can do collectively or individually is to steer towards the least worse outcome. Computational communication has entered a new era and it's both exciting and frightening to explore the potentials and opportunities. In 1997 getting access to 1 teraFLOPS of computational power would have cost you $55 million and required a strategic partnership with the Department of Defense. At the time of writing, anyone can rent 1 teraFLOPS on a cloud GPU marketplace for less than $1/day. <sup class="footnote-ref" id="fnref-asci_option_red"><a href="#fn-asci_option_red">2</a></sup>.</p>
<p>I hope that this project will illuminate the darker areas of strange world of facial recognition that have not yet received attention and encourage discourse in academic, industry, and . By no means do I believe discourse can save the day. Nor do I think creating artwork can. In fact, I'm not exactly sure what the outcome of this project will be. The project is not so much what I publish here but what happens after. This entire project is only a prologue.</p>
<p>As McLuhan wrote, "You can't have a static, fixed position in the electric age". And in our hyper-connected age of mass surveillance, artificial intelligece, and unevenly distributed virtual futures the most irrational thing to be is rational. Increasingly the world is becoming a contradiction where people use surveillance to protest surveillance, use</p>
<p>Like many projects, MegaPixels had spent years meandering between formats, unfeasible budgets, and was generally too niche of a subject. The basic idea for this project, as proposed to the original <a href="https://tacticaltech.org/projects/the-glass-room-nyc/">Glass Room</a> installation in 2016 in NYC, was to build an interactive mirror that showed people if they had been included in the <a href="/datasets/lfw">LFW</a> facial recognition dataset. The idea was based on my reaction to all the datasets I'd come across during research for the CV Dazzle project. I'd noticed strange datasets created for training and testing face detection algorithms. Most were created in labratory settings and their interpretation of face data was very strict.</p>
<h3>for other post</h3>
<p>It was the early 2000s. Face recognition was new and no one seemed sure how well it was going to perform in practice. In theory, face recognition was poised to be a game changer, a force multiplier, a strategic military advantage, a way to make cities safer and to secure the borders. It was the future that John Ashcroft demanded with the Total Information Awareness act of the 2003. It was a future that academics helped build. It was a future that celebrities helped build. And it was a future that</p>
<p>A decade earlier the Department of Homeland Security and the Counterdrug Technology Development Program Office initated a feasibilty study called FERET (FacE REcognition Technology) to "develop automatic face recognition capabilities that could be employed to assist security, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties [^feret_website]."</p>
<p>One problem with FERET dataset was that the photos were in controlled settings. For face recognition to work it would have to be used in uncontrolled settings. Even newer datasets such as the Multi-PIE (Pose, Illumination, and Expression) from Carnegie Mellon University included only indoor photos of cooperative subjects. Not only were the photos completely unrealistic, CMU's Multi-Pie included only 18 individuals and cost $500 for academic use [^cmu_multipie_cost], took years to create, and required consent from every participant.</p>
<h2>Add progressive gan of FERET</h2>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol><li id="fn-met_police"><p>Sharman, Jon. "Metropolitan Police's facial recognition technology 98% inaccurate, figures show". 2018. <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/met-police-facial-recognition-success-south-wales-trial-home-office-false-positive-a8345036.html">https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/met-police-facial-recognition-success-south-wales-trial-home-office-false-positive-a8345036.html</a><a href="#fnref-met_police" class="footnote">↩</a></p></li>
<li id="fn-asci_option_red"><p>Calle, Dan. "Supercomptuers". 1997. <a href="http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/SUPERCOM.Calle.HTML">http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/SUPERCOM.Calle.HTML</a><a href="#fnref-asci_option_red" class="footnote">↩</a></p></li>
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