Surveillance images are often low quality, for example, and gathering pictures from the internet tends to yield too many celebrities. (Some of the sets are derived from others, so the figures include some duplicates.) But these caches had flaws. Later, researchers turned to more aggressive and surreptitious methods to gather faces at a grander scale, tapping into surveillance cameras in coffee shops, college campuses and public spaces, and scraping photos posted online.Īccording to Adam Harvey, an artist who tracks the data sets, there are probably more than 200 in existence, containing tens of millions of photos of approximately one million people. In the infancy of facial-recognition technology, researchers developed their algorithms with subjects’ clear consent: In the 1990s, universities had volunteers come to studios to be photographed from many angles. How did the Papas and hundreds of thousands of other people end up in the database? It’s a roundabout story. I think artificial intelligence is cool and I want it to be smarter, but generally you ask people to participate in research. “I wish they would have asked me first if I wanted to be part of it. Papa, who is now 19 and attending college in Oregon. Containing the likenesses of nearly 700,000 individuals, it has been downloaded by dozens of companies to train a new generation of face-identification algorithms, used to track protesters, surveil terrorists, spot problem gamblers and spy on the public at large. None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace. Their mother, Dominique Allman Papa, uploaded them to Flickr after joining the photo-sharing site in 2005. The pictures of Chloe and Jasper Papa as kids are typically goofy fare: grinning with their parents sticking their tongues out costumed for Halloween. Now some of those faces may have the ability to sue. How Photos of Your Kids Are Powering Surveillance Technology Millions of Flickr images were sucked into a database called MegaFace.