track chinas uighur populationmy curiosity turned to horror he saidhow honeymoon photos helped build surveillance systems in china is in some ways a story of unintended or unanticipated consequencesyears ago ai researchers at leading universities and tech companies began gathering digital photos from a wide variety of sources including photosharing services social networks dating sites like okcupid and even cameras installed on college quads they shared those photos with other organizationsthat was just the norm for researchers they all needed data to feed into their new ai systems so they shared what they had it was usually legalone example was megaface a data set created by professors at the university of washington in 2015 they built it without the knowledge or consent of the people whose images they folded into its enormous pool of photos the professors posted it to the internet so others could download itmegaface has been downloaded more than 6000 times by companies and government agencies around the world according to a new york times public records request they included the us defense contractor northrop grumman inqtel the investment arm of the central intelligence agency bytedance the parent company of the chinese social media app tiktok and the chinese surveillance company megviiresearchers built megaface for use in an academic competition meant to spur the development of facial recognition systems it was not intended for commercial use but only a small percentage of those who downloaded megaface publicly participated in the competitionwe are not in a position to discuss thirdparty projects said victor balta a university of washington spokesman megaface has been decommissioned and megaface data are no longer being distributedimagecreditgilles sabri for the new york timessome who downloaded the data have deployed facial recognition systems megvii was blacklisted last year by the commerce department after the chinese government used its technology to monitor the countrys uighur populationthe university of washington took megaface offline in may and other organizations have removed other data sets but copies of these files could be anywhere and they are likely to be feeding new researchms osullivan and mr harvey spent years trying to build a tool that could expose how all that data was being used it was more difficult than they had anticipatedthey wanted to accept someones photo and using facial recognition instantly tell that person how many times his or her face was included in one of these data sets but they worried that such a tool could be used in bad ways by stalkers or by companies and nation statesthe potential for harm seemed too great said ms osullivan who is also vice president of responsible ai with arthur a new york company that helps businesses manage the behavior of ai technologiesin the end they were forced to limit how people could search the tool and what results it delivered the tool as it works today is not as effective as they would like but the researchers worried that they could not expose the breadth of the problem without