Diversity in Faces

Transparency and accountability 🙉

IBM was seen to have been opaque in a number of ways about its Diversity in Faces dataset.

• Limited disclosure to subjects. Many individuals whose images were included were not directly informed or asked for consent. And while the dataset used photos from Flickr under Creative Commons licenses, people appearing in the photos were unlikely to have realised their images could be used for facial recognition research.

• Unclear data handling practices. IBM provided limited public information on how it stored, processed, and secured the biometric data. Furthermore, the it did not make clear its policies regarding long-term retention and potential sharing of the dataset.

• Opaque annotation process. The methods used to annotate facial attributes (e.g. skin tone, facial structure) were not fully detailed, resulting in questions about potential biases in the annotation process.

• Restricted access for scrutiny. IBM limited access to the dataset, making independent auditing and verification challenging. This restricted the ability of third-party researchers to assess potential biases and other issues.

• Ambiguous usage guidelines. IBM failed to make it clear how it expected the dataset to be used by third parties, potentially leading to potential misuse or applications beyond the intended scope.

• Unclear impact on AI systems. The downstream effects of using the DiF dataset to train AI systems were not fully explored or disclosed, making it difficult to assess potential biases or issues in resulting facial recognition technologies.

• Limited accountability mechanisms. IBM said people whose photos had been included in the dataset could technically opt-out of the dataset through the company's generic research privacy policy, but nobody was informed that their data had been used, there was a lack of clear processes for individuals to determine if their images were included or to request removal, and it was impossible to delete them from copies that had already been provided to third-parties.

Risks and harms 🛑

IBM's Diversity in Faces dataset raised significant ethical concerns regarding privacy, consent, its potential misuse for surveillance, discriminatory and other purposes. It was also criticised for inadequate transparency.

Legal, regulatory 👩🏼‍⚖️

• Vance v International Business Machines Corporation (pdf)

Investigations, assessments, audits 👁️

• Harvey, A., LaPlace, J. (2019). Exposing.ai

Research, advocacy 🧮

• Raji I.D., Gebru T., Mitchell M., Buolamwini J., Lee J., Denton E. (2020). Saving Face: Investigating the Ethical Concerns of Facial Recognition Auditing

• Crawford K., Paglen T. (2021). Excavating AI: the politics of images in machine learning training sets