Ethical Considerations for Responsible Data Curation

Jerone Andrews

Dora Zhao

William Thong

Apostolos Modas

Orestis Papakyriakopoulos

Alice Xiang

NeurIPS 2023

2023

Abstract

Human-centric computer vision (HCCV) data curation practices often neglect privacy and bias concerns, leading to dataset retractions and unfair models. HCCV datasets constructed through nonconsensual web scraping lack crucial metadata for comprehensive fairness and robustness evaluations. Current remedies are post hoc, lack persuasive justification for adoption, or fail to provide proper contextualization for appropriate application. Our research focuses on proactive, domain-specific recommendations, covering purpose, privacy and consent, as well as diversity, for curating HCCV evaluation datasets, addressing privacy and bias. We adopt an ante hoc reflective perspective, drawing from current practices, guidelines, dataset withdrawals, and audits, to inform our considerations and recommendations.