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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
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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.

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Nature 587, 354-358 (2020)

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

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Supplementary Information

  1. Spreadsheet of Nature survey summary results

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