[D66] Massive photo databases secretly gathered in US and Europe to develop facial recognition

[A. OUT]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/17/face-j17.html

Massive photo databases secretly gathered in US and Europe to develop
facial recognition
By Kevin Reed
17 July 2019

A report in the New York Times on Sunday revealed that millions of
facial photos have been scraped from online sources and taken by hidden
surveillance cameras and then shared in databases for artificial
intelligence (AI) research and development purposes for more than a
decade. Created in secret by universities and tech companies, the photo
data sets have been mined for the R&D of facial recognition and
biometric technologies that are now used ubiquitously by police and
state intelligence agencies around the world.

[...]

For example, a project called Brainwash was launched jointly by Stanford
University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany in
2014 and deployed a hidden webcam in the Brainwash Café in downtown San
Francisco. Stanford University is well known for its connections to US
military-intelligence. For example, Google was developed at Stanford
with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
and other state intelligence agencies in the early 1990s. Although not
mentioned by the Times, the Max Planck Institute has long standing and
direct ties to German imperialism.

Over a three-day period, 11,917 video streams of 100 seconds each were
captured without the consent of those in the Brainwash Café. According
to MegaPixels, “No ordinary café customer could ever suspect that their
image would end up in dataset used for surveillance research and
development, but that is exactly what happened to customers at Brainwash
Cafe in San Francisco.”

MegaPixels also said that the videos were published online using
AngelCam, a web streaming service that is sold for home security
purposes for as little as $6 per month. The Brainwash database was
subsequently used for AI research purposes in China, Switzerland,
Netherlands, the US, India and Canada.

[...]