Exposing.ai is created by Adam Harvey and is based on the earlier MegaPixels computer vision face recognition installation (2017 - 2020). This new project, Exposing.ai, launched in January 2021 is based on years of research about image training datasets used for face recognition and related biometric analysis technologies.
Through investigating the systems developed for facial recognition technologies a pattern emerged: the algorithms were being trained on hundreds of millions of images scraped from the internet, mostly from Flickr.com where permissive and unprotected "Creative Commons" licenses were routinely and deliberately exploited for biometric data.
This website helps tell a small part of the story about what face recognition is and how it became powerful, and how Creative Commons continues to play a major role in biometric data proliferation.
During research fellowships with the Karlsruhe HfG Critical AI Group and Weizenbaum Institut in Berlin during 2020, Adam and Jules developed the technology that could allow users to check for their Flickr photos within these datasets. They then teamed up with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), and combined efforts to bring this project to the public. In January 2021 Adam, Jules, and the STOP team launched the new Exposing.ai website.
If you are Flickr.com user and have uploaded photos containing faces or other biometric information between 2004 and 2020, your photos may have been used to train, test, or enhance artificial intelligence surveillance technologies for use in academic, commercial, or defense related applications.
Exposing.ai provides a search engine to check if your Flickr photos were used in dozens of the most widely used and cited public face and biometric image datasets used for these purposes. Although Exposing.ai searches millions of records, it is not a fully comprehensive search for all image training datasets. Only datasets that were publicly accessible, include Flickr images, and included metadata are searchable on Exposing.ai. Countless more face recognition training datasets exist and are continuously being scraped from social media, news, and entertainment sites. Future versions of this project may expand to include more search options.
You can read more about the project on the FAQ page. For technical inquiries or information about further datasets to include on this site, contact Adam Harvey on Keybase at https://keybase.io/exposing_ai. A secure and anonymous connection can be established to share tips.
The Exposing.ai project gratefully acknowledgment the guidance, feedback, and discussions with everyone who has been a part this project. In particular Daniel Kessler, Matteo Pasquinelli, Nanna Bonde, Bianca Herlo, Liz O'Sullivan, Albert Fox Cahn, and Marek Tuszynski (Tactical Tech).
If you reference this research project or use any data from the Exposing.ai project, cite our original research as follows:
@online{Exposing.ai,
author = {Harvey, Adam. LaPlace, Jules.},
title = {Exposing.ai},
year = 2021,
url = {https://exposing.ai},
urldate = {2021-01-01}
}