Security News > 2020 > March > NIST shared dataset of tattoos that’s been used to identify prisoners
For years, the EFF has been saying that developing algorithms that the FBI and law enforcement can use to identify similar tattoos from images - similar to how automated facial recognition systems work - raises significant First Amendment questions.
UNICAMP also said that its researcher - Prof. Léo Pini Magalhãe - is adding to the dataset by grabbing images of tattoos from the web: a practice that the EFF noted has increasingly come under fire from Congress in light of the Clearview AI face recognition scandal.
After the EFF raised concerns about the PII in the images, NIST retroactively stripped images containing PII from its dataset.
Documents produced in response to our FOIA suit include a presentation showing that researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation had the ability to match tattoos from websites to a national criminal database.
Researchers at Nanyang Technological University used the Flickr API to download thousands of images, which it then used in research that also involved the NIST dataset.