Students at UCCS were secretly photographed in an effort to advance facial recognition technology.

It was a project that was funded with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies and the military. The data, named the Unconstrained College Students, is arguably the most advanced of its kind and involved taking photographs of more than 1700 unsuspecting students who were traveling around the campus.

Students weren't looking straight ahead in many of the photos and the images were often blurry, or faces were obstructed etc, but this was what made the data valuable and now that data is used for training facial recognition algorithms.

According to the senior investigative researcher, D Maass, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they see this as an effort which seeks to normalize peeping tom culture and many have criticized the seeming violation of privacy for those who were unknowingly included in the study.

The man behind the project, Dr. T. Boult, argues that there isn't anything wrong or illegal with taking photographs of people in public but admits that he's been trying to balance ethical and privacy concerns while conducting his work.

CU officials have also defended the project, but some are still questioning whether or not this might be crossing some boundaries.

Should people be included in studies without their consent? The controversial facial recognition project started back in 2012, when Boult attached a camera to a school building and started secretly filming and photographing.

They were able to capture thousands of images, over 16,000, between 2012 and 2013.

The objective was to try and improve facial recognition technology, but why couldn't they seek to do it in such a way that didn't include taking photos of unsuspecting individuals? Are there no willing participants who would voluntarily agree to walk by the camera and let it film them? They say that they wanted to capture people acting naturally, but surely asking a few participants to walk past a camera would produce much of the same results that they collected in secret.

"The research protocol was analyzed by the UCCS Institutional Review Board, which assures the protection of the rights and welfare of human subjects in research,.... No personal information was collected or distributed in this specific study. The photographs were collected in public areas and made available to researchers after five years when most students would have graduated." - University spokesperson J. Verner

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