After an EFF campaign started last year, roughly a third of institutions that it said requested tattoo recognition data deleted it or reported that they had never received or used it.EFF said it had ethical concerns about an effort known as Tatt-C (also known as the Tattoo Recognition Challenge) that was managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.After EFF filed a FOIA lawsuit in 2017 seeking access to NIST and FBI records about Tatt-C, the group obtained documents that listed institutions and other parties that had requested the Tatt-C dataset. It then wrote to each entity and demanded that the research institutions, if they had received the Tatt-C dataset, delete the images, initiate an internal review of all research generated by using the dataset,”Tattoos are also incredibly personal and often contain specific information and identifiers that could be used to track down a person even if their face and identity have been obscured,” wrote the privacy group.
EFF claims success in tattoo recognition initiative
