The audit of the dataset, published in Big Data & Society by authors Os Keyes and Jeanine Austin, dives deep into the origins and problems of the project, which took still images from YouTube videos uploaded by 38 different people.Researchers led by UNCW’s Karl Ricanek pulled more than one million frames from the videos of trans people in the middle of transition, created what they called the “HRT Transgender Dataset.” Controversy erupted over the project shortly after it was brought to public attention.Ricanek justified the experiment with an extreme and virtually impossible scenario: terrorists using HRT to avoid facial recognition and sneak across borders undetected.According to Ricanek, UNCW’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) told him he didn’t need the board’s approval to build the dataset.This is backed up by emails between Keyes and UNCW’s IRB, which state that the study was not subject to oversight from the IRB.“We saw absolutely no indication; the only emails relating to participants were a complaint from a participant that she had not been notified, and an email from the postdoc on the project confirming to a third party that participants had not given their consent,” Keyes told Motherboard."