← the record
WF-E2PPDQ

N-Tech.lab's FindFace used to identify St Petersburg metro passengers without consent

Egor Tsvetkov photographed passengers on the St Petersburg metro without their permission and used N-Tech.lab's facial recognition service FindFace to match their faces to public Vkontakte profiles. He published the results in an art project called 'Your Face is Big Data', saying he wanted to show how 'digital narcissism' can lead to stalking. Privacy advocates said the project was ethically problematic because the subjects had not consented and their identities were exposed. FindFace had been launched by N-Tech.lab in February 2016.

Organisation involved
N-Tech.lab
Product, system or model
FindFace
Where this came from
Share this incident
XLinkedInFacebookWhatsAppEmail
Attribution

This incident was imported from advox.globalvoices.org. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.

This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.

N-Tech.lab's FindFace used to identify St Petersburg metro passengers without consent — Wayward Fowl