Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS FEATURE

The ethical questions that haunt facial-recognition research

Journals and researchers are under fire for controversial studies using this technology. And a Nature survey reveals that many researchers in this field think there is a problem.
  1. Richard Van Noorden
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Images from the MegaFace face recognition training and benchmarking data set

A collage of images from the MegaFace data set, which scraped online photos. Images are obscured to protect people’s privacy. Credit: Adam Harvey/megapixels.cc based on the MegaFace data set by Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman et al. based on the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million data set and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licences

In September 2019, four researchers wrote to the publisher Wiley to “respectfully ask” that it immediately retract a scientific paper. The study, published in 2018, had trained algorithms to distinguish faces of Uyghur people, a predominantly Muslim minority ethnic group in China, from those of Korean and Tibetan ethnicity1.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 587, 354-358 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03187-3

References

  1. Wang, C., Zhang, Q., Liu, W., Liu, Y. & Miao, L. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 9, e1278 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Stewart, R., Andriluka, M. & Ng, A. Y. in Proc. 2016 IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2325–2333 (IEEE, 2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ristani, E., Solera, F., Zou, R. S., Cucchiara, R. & Tomasi, C. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01775 (2016).

  4. Nech, A. & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I. in Proc. 2017 IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 3406–3415 (IEEE, 2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Guo, Y., Zhang, L., Hu., Y., He., X. & Gao, J. in Computer Vision — ECCV 2016 (eds Leibe, B., Matas, J., Sebe, N. & Welling, M.) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46487-9_6 (Springer, 2016).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Jasserand, C. in Data Protection and Privacy: The Internet of Bodies (eds Leenes, R., van Brakel, R., Gutwirth, S. & de Hert, P.) Ch. 7 (Hart, 2018).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Moreau, Y. Nature 576, 36–38 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Zhang, D. et al. Int. J. Legal Med. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-019-02049-6 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Pan, X. et al. Int. J. Legal Med. 134, 2079 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Wu, X. & Xhang, X. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135 (2016).

  11. Hashemi, M. & Hall, M. J. Big Data 7, 2 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Supplementary Information

  1. Spreadsheet of Nature survey summary results

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

  • Faculty Positions at SUSTech School of Medicine

    SUSTech School of Medicine offers equal opportunities and welcome applicants from the world with all ethnic backgrounds.

    Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

    Southern University of Science and Technology, School of Medicine

  • Postdoctoral Fellowships Worldwide

    IBSA Foundation for scientific research offers 6 fellowships offers of € 32.000 to young researchers under 40 years.

    The call is open to people from research institutes and universities from all over the world.

    IBSA Foundation for scientific research

  • Staff Scientist - Immunology

    Staff Scientist- Immunology

    Houston, Texas (US)

    Baylor College of Medicine (BCM)

  • Institute for Systems Genetics, Tenure Track Faculty Positions

    The Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health has tenure track faculty positions (assistant professor level) at the new SynBioMed Center.

    New York City, New York (US)

    NYU Langone Health

  • Faculty Position

    The Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology (ICOB), Academia Sinica, Taiwan, is seeking candidates to fill multiple tenure-track faculty position

    Taipei (TW)

    Institute of Cellular and Organismic Biology, Academia Sinica

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links