Fueling AI with public displays?: a feasibility study of collecting biometrically tagged consensual data on a university campus

Interactive public displays have matured into highly capable two-way interfaces. They can be used for efficiently delivering information to people as well as for collecting insights from their users. While displays have been used for harvesting opinions and other content from users, surprisingly little work has looked into exploiting such screens for the consensual collection of tagged data that might be useful beyond one application. We present a field study where we collected biometrically tagged data using public kiosk-sized interactive screens. During 61 days of deployment time, we collected 199 selfie videos, cost-efficiently and with consent to leverage the videos in any non-profit research. 78 of the videos also had metadata attached to them. Overall, our studies indicate that people are willing to donate even highly sensitive data about themselves in public but that, at the same time, the participants had specific ethical and privacy concerns over the future of their data. Our study paves the way forward toward a future where volunteers can ethically help advance innovations in computer vision research across a variety of exciting application domains, such as health monitoring and care.