Microsoft Quietly Deletes Largest Public Face Recognition Data Set

Microsoft has quietly pulled from the internet its database of 10 million faces [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], which has been used to train facial recognition systems around the world, including by military researchers and Chinese firms such as SenseTime and Megvii. From a report: The database, known as MS Celeb, was published in 2016 and described by the company as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world, containing more than 10m images of nearly 100,000 individuals. The people whose photos were used were not asked for their consent, their images were scraped off the web from search engines and videos under the terms of the Creative Commons license that allows academic reuse of photos.

Microsoft, which took down the database days after the FT reported on its use by companies, said: 'The site was intended for academic purposes. It was run by an employee that is no longer with Microsoft and has since been removed.' Two other data sets have also been taken down since the FT report was published in April, including the Duke MTMC surveillance data set built by Duke University researchers, and a Stanford University data set called Brainwash.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.