Incident 298: Student-Developed Facial Recognition App Raised Ethical Concerns
Description: TheFaceTag app, a social networking app developed and deployed within-campus by a student at Harvard raised concerns surrounding its facial recognition, cybersecurity, privacy, and misuse.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Yuen Ler Chow developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed TheFaceTag app users.
Suggested citation format
Pednekar, Sonali. (2021-10-21) Incident Number 298. in Lam, K. (ed.) Artificial Intelligence Incident Database. Responsible AI Collaborative.
Incident Stats
Incident ID
298
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2021-10-21
Editors
Khoa Lam
Reports Timeline
Incident Reports

An idea that began as a joke between freshmen in Annenberg soon blossomed into a full-fledged app whose name evokes a certain 2004 project by a Harvard sophomore. Early in the endeavor to create the app FaceTag, concerns over ethics and pri…


A Harvard student came up with the idea of a social network that uses faces to communicate and exchange information, similar to how Mark Zuckerberg once created Facebook.
From a Harvard University dorm room, freshman Yuen Ler Chow created t…

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Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.