Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS FEATURE

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
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

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.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 587, 354-358 (2020)

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

References

  1. Wang, C., Zhang, Q., Liu, W., Liu, Y. & Miao, L. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Data Min. Knowl. Discov. 9, e1278 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Stewart, R., Andriluka, M. & Ng, A. Y. in Proc. 2016 IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2325–2333 (IEEE, 2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ristani, E., Solera, F., Zou, R. S., Cucchiara, R. & Tomasi, C. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01775 (2016).

  4. Nech, A. & Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, I. in Proc. 2017 IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 3406–3415 (IEEE, 2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Guo, Y., Zhang, L., Hu., Y., He., X. & Gao, J. in Computer Vision — ECCV 2016 (eds Leibe, B., Matas, J., Sebe, N. & Welling, M.) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46487-9_6 (Springer, 2016).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Jasserand, C. in Data Protection and Privacy: The Internet of Bodies (eds Leenes, R., van Brakel, R., Gutwirth, S. & de Hert, P.) Ch. 7 (Hart, 2018).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Moreau, Y. Nature 576, 36–38 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  8. Zhang, D. et al. Int. J. Legal Med. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-019-02049-6 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Pan, X. et al. Int. J. Legal Med. 134, 2079 (2020).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Wu, X. & Xhang, X. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135 (2016).

  11. Hashemi, M. & Hall, M. J. Big Data 7, 2 (2020).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Supplementary Information

  1. Spreadsheet of Nature survey summary results

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

  • Postdoctoral positions at University of Pennsylvania

    Postdoctoral positions funded by NIH are for study of meiosis and spermatogonial stem cells using mouse models. Generous stipend and benefits.

    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (US)

    University of Pennsylvania - Department of Biomedical Sciences

  • Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Communications (Materials Science)

    Associate or Senior Editor (Materials Science) Organization: Nature Communications Location(s): New York, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Beijing, Hong ...

    New York (US)

    Springer Nature Ltd

  • Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Medicine

    Associate or Senior, Nature Medicine: Infectious Diseases New York, Shanghai or Beijing - Hybrid Working Application Deadline: August 1, 2024   Nat...

    New York City, New York (US)

    Springer Nature Ltd

  • Post-doctoral Fellow

    Funded investigator has an immediate opening for a post-doctoral fellow to develop therapies for genetic diseases.

    Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, East Baltimore Campus

    Johns Hopkins University Department of Medicine

  • Postdoctoral Fellow PhD

    Houston, Texas (US)

    Baylor College of Medicine (BCM)

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links