Student-Developed Facial Recognition App Raised Ethical Concerns

October 21, 2021

TheFaceTag app, a social networking application developed by a student at Harvard University, has sparked discussions regarding facial recognition, cybersecurity, privacy, and potential misuse. This incident highlights the importance of governance for trustworthy AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance and contributing to Project Cerebellum's AI incident database, learn more about how this case maps to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) by JOIN US.

Contributing to the understanding and management of incidents like TheFaceTag can help ensure safe and secure AI for all.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.679, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.662, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.657, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: yuen-ler-chow
Alleged developer: yuen-ler-chow
Alleged harmed parties: thefacetag-app-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/298

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.