Most optical implants on sale detect the faces of the people their wearers look at in every frame, whether or not the wearer has turned on any feature that needs them, according to a report published today by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Chiba Centre for Visual Science, the research centre of the Kiroshi Foundation in Japan.
The report, Bystanders: what optical implants see of other people, tested nine implant models in standard scenes and read their makers’ published documentation and terms. Seven of the nine detect faces in every frame. Five keep some record of what they have detected for longer than the two seconds allowed by the Foundation’s bystander privacy standard, KF-OS 2, and all five do so under exclusions for diagnostic data.
With lawyers in each country, the authors also reviewed privacy, data protection and surveillance law in the thirteen countries where the models are sold. They found that no country’s law treats the people an implant looks at as having any say in what it keeps about them, unless the images are published.
“The people in front of an implant are not its users, its customers or its patients,” said Professor Judith Demery, Director of the Centre for the Ethics of Perception, who led the University’s part of the work. “At present they are nobody, in law and mostly in design. We set out to describe exactly how much of them a device keeps, and on what terms.”
The report is the main output of Whose view is it? Consent, bystanders and the ethics of seeing through a device, a three-year project funded by the Kiroshi Foundation and based at the Centre for the Ethics of Perception. The Foundation has said that the report will be the basis for a revision of KF-OS 2, which will open for public comment in 2027.
The project received ethical approval from the University’s Arts and Humanities Research Ethics Committee (reference AHREC/2022/117).
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