UCCS professor defends facial recognition project that photographed unsuspecting students

The University of Colorado Colorado Springs is facing criticism for taking photographs of students without their permission and putting those photos into a facial recognition database.

It is part of a research project approved by the university but some are saying it pushed the bounds of privacy too far.

The research project was conducted by Dr. Terrance Boult with the University’s Innovation and Security department. They competed against other colleges to get the funding from the Navy to conduct the project.

“We are not actually the only group to have done this, four or five other universities have,” Boult says. It was done to test the capabilities of facial recognition technology. The project was conducted in 2013.

Boult says, “The government uses it to look for potential terrorists, they are used in places to look for fraud so there’s a lot of good uses for facial recognition.”

In one location of the campus, thousands of unsuspecting students were photographed from about 120 meters away using long ranged cameras.

In some cases, the cameras did recognize faces that walked that path but Boult says more research needs to be done, “There to the point where it’s usable but still not finished. Unconstrained face is still not a solved problem.”

The professor is aware of the privacy concerns some have raised about the research. When we asked him about it he said, “It’s a public space with no expectation of privacy we have no one’s name, no identification, nothing about them. It’s pretty benign normal surveillance camera operation.”

Adding the reason why the photographs were released five years after the fact was also done to protect student privacy.

Boult says this research needs to be done to avoid future problems with facial recognition which already plays a big role in our lives.

“Misuse of this technology is bad but going after researchers who are trying to make the technology better just seemed like a misplaced argument for where privacy should be focused on,” Boult says.

So far no students have come forward saying they want their photos removed but again the project only recently came to public light.