This year, Nature asked 480 researchers around the world who work in facial recognition, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) for their views on thorny ethical questions about facial-recognition research. The results of this first-of-a-kind survey suggest that some scientists are concerned about the ethics of work in this field — but others still don’t see academic studies as problematic.

Journals and researchers are under fire for controversial studies using this technology. And a Nature survey reveals that many researchers in this field think there is a problem.