Adam Harvey

This talk will present the MegaPixels project, a website and resource for exploring face recognition training datasets. MegaPixels is an art and research project about the growing crisis of authoritarian biometric surveillance technologies and how data, often originating from social media, has unwittingly contributed to its growth.

While most face recognition training datasets include images of celebrity faces, many more include everyday images from Flickr, YouTube, or even CCTV footage from cities and campuses. This talk will survey existing face recognition datasets on the megapixels.cc site and present a new investigation revealing the use of CCC videos in a face recognition training dataset created and distributed by a US Government agency. The investigation will show who is using the dataset, where it's being used, and what kind of surveillance technologies these images are unwittingly contributing to. MegaPixels is developed by: Adam Harvey / ahprojects.com Jules LaPlace / asdf.us

From geo-magnetic tracking for smartphones to facial recognition for email marketing, from physical shopping cart fingerprinting to computer vision algorithms that use your clothing as metadata, this talk will explore the emerging landscape of hyper-competitive retail surveillance. Instead of dramatizing these technologies which can lead to calcification and normalization, the aim of this talk is to energize discourse around building creative solutions to counter, adapt to, or rethink emerging surveillance technologies.

Retail surveillance technologies are often overshadowed by more threatening government surveillance technologies, but retail surveillance presents a different kind of threat. It forms the foundation for bottom-up surveillance of personal data that would otherwise be too difficult for a government surveillance program to collect. Data including your most personal photos, messages, and movements are routinely collected and sold by commercial services. Retail surveillance also poses risks for data breaches and leaks and enables new forms of psychological and behavioral monitoring that aim to influence and control the behaviors of "consumers".

The biggest concern today, said Phil Zimmerman (2015), is not software backdoors, but the petabytes of information being hoarded by the likes of Google and Facebook. Silent Circle co-founder Mike Janke has also voiced concern over this type of surveillance and data collection warning that "the data companies of the world have more data on you than GCHQ does, absolutely."

This talk will survey current and emerging trends and technologies used in retail surveillance with the goal of enabling others to create a more informed retail-surveillance threat model, countersurveillance workarounds, and knowledge for protest/democratic participation.