Faces of the Riot facial recognition raises privacy concerns

Over 6,000 facial images of people taking part in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol building were made available on Faces of the Riot, raising privacy concerns.

The site isolated and made public geo-tagged images of people involved in the insurrection that had been posted to Parler, the social networking service associated with Donald Trump supporters. The images had previously been downloaded by hackers after Amazon had decided to cease hosting Parler. 

Whilst each face on the site is only tagged with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared, and faces are not named, the initiative raised privacy concerns. It was also seen to have failed to distinguish between lawbreakers and people legally attending the protests.