Facial recognition, a group of researchers used images of trans people without their consent

It was 2013 when researchers at the University of North Carolina assembled a database of more than a million images of transgender people, without the explicit consent of the interested parties. The images had been taken from YouTube: the owners had uploaded videos talking about their transition experience. The researchers pooled the database to train a successful facial recognition algorithm identify people before and after starting hormone replacement therapy. But that is not all. The researchers also left the images and videos in a Dropbox folder until 2021. One dataset that contained stills of thirty-eight people’s medical transition process remained in an unsecured archive for eight years.

Why was it necessary to develop this technology? Karl Ricanek, the head of the research team, gave an explanation both problematic and improbable: what gods terrorists could use HRT to disguise themselves and bypass facial recognition systems. In case you’re wondering: it’s about one entirely hypothetical scenario and highly imaginative. Nothing like this has ever happened in reality.

Ricanek says he followed all standard procedures for conducting the study: he corresponded with the university for permission to build the database and says he contacted all the people whose faces appeared on the set. Of this last step, however, there is no trace in the independent audits. The study published in the journal Big Data & Societysigned by Os Keyes and Jeanine Austin, not found in official studio documents no correspondence with the persons concerned. There is an email from 2017 sent by one of the study subjects asking why his photos were included without his explicit consent. Ricanek continues to assert that he followed all the protocols and contacted the people involved, and that the exchanges were not present in the public records due to a change in the university’s computer systems. In the audit records reviewed for Keyes and Austin, it is also noted that Ricanek sent the Dropbox link to the database to several people within the Academy, and continued to use the images in different occasionslimiting himself to covering the eyes of the people portrayed with small yellow dots.

The idea that a terrorist or a malicious person can take a hormone to disguise himself and evade the security systems of national borders is just absurd. “QThese hypothetical motivations mirror more general transphobic stereotypes – that transgender people are suspicious, sneaky“, has commented Keyes a motherboard. Several states in the US have passed or are discussing laws to limit the rights of transgender people. A facial recognition application is much more likely to come used by the authorities to further criminalize themrather than to stop a terrorist attack.