A university study of what eye implants see was changed in a closed session. The university won’t say how.
Oxenfurt’s Bystanders report, paid for by a foundation that part-owns an implant maker, says its device tests were staged with consenting volunteers. The ethics committee’s minute on the study’s second amendment records only “reserved business.”
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LONDON — When Bystanders: what optical implants see of other people was published on Dec. 9, its findings drew wide attention. Seven of the nine implant models tested detect the faces of people in front of the wearer in every frame, the report said, whether or not the wearer has switched on any feature that needs them. Five keep some record of what they detect for longer than the two seconds allowed by a bystander privacy standard that the study’s own funder publishes.
Less attention went to how the study was approved, or to who paid for it.
The project, run by Oxenfurt University’s Faculty of Philosophy from 2022 to 2025, was funded by the research foundation of a Tokyo optics company, a charity that owns part of the company and publishes its own standards for implant makers. The foundation published the report with the faculty as co-author, and its research center near Tokyo ran the device tests. Under the grant agreement, the university says, the foundation could review publications before submission for confidential information belonging to it or to a connected company, but could not change the findings.
The university says the device tests were staged with volunteers who gave written consent. The data from them is held by the foundation’s research center, and the university says it is not available from Oxenfurt.
Minute 24/19
Research involving people at Oxenfurt must be approved by one of three ethics committees. The university publishes their minutes, with confidential business removed. The minutes show that the Arts and Humanities Research Ethics Committee approved the project in 2022 with minor conditions, and approved amendments in 2023 and 2024.
The record of the second amendment, minute 24/19, reads in full: “Reserved business. Recorded in the confidential minute.”
The Overseen asked the university what the amendment changed, why it was taken in reserved business, and whether any footage or images were used in the study other than those recorded in staged scenes. A spokesperson said the committee’s confidential minutes are not published, “in line with its terms of reference,” and that the project had received ethical approval at every stage.
One member of the committee at the time, the philosopher Dr. Clare Kearney, stood down from it in 2025. Reached by email, she declined to comment.
The foundation has said the report will inform a revision of its standard on bystander privacy, to open for public comment in 2027.
Correction, : An earlier version of this story said the committee first approved the project in 2021. It approved it in 2022.