MegaPixels is an ongoing project about machine learning image datasets. This first chapter of the project launched in London in 2017 in collaboration with Tactical Tech for the Glass Room exhibition.
The installation used facial recognition to search for your identity in the largest publicly available facial recognition training dataset in the world, called MegaFace (V2). Out of approximately 15,000 users, two people reported finding a positive match in the training database which they never knew existed.
What many people aren't aware of is that you might be included in this facial recognition training dataset because it was created entirely from Flickr. The dataset contains approximately 672,000 identities and 4.2 million photos, all obtained from Flickr without anyone consenting.
These 4.2 million images are currently being passed between researchers in the US, China, Russia, and all over the world to train and evaluate state-of-the-art facial recognition algorithms. If you knew that your image, your friend's image, or your child's image was being used for developing products in the defense industry, would you object? How would you even find out if your photo was included?
MegaPixels is an ongoing project to bring these datasets into the public view , provide new tools to explore their contents, and surface the ethical implications of datasets.