Microsoft Deleted a Massive Facial Recognition Database, But It's Not Dead

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3x4mp/microsoft-deleted-a-facial-recognition-database-but-its-not-dead

By Jordan Pearson
Motherboard.vice.com
June 6, 2019

Microsoft has unexpectedly pulled a gigantic facial recognition database
containing photos of people's faces from the internet, but traces of the data
trove remain online.

If you've ever uploaded photos of yourself to the internet under a creative
commons license—which allows for re-use under certain conditions—they may
already have been used to train AI programs to recognize human faces.

Microsoft released MS-Celeb-1M, a dataset of roughly 10 million photos from
100,000 individuals collected from the internet in 2016. The database was
designed to contain photos of celebrities, but as Berlin-based researcher Adam
Harvey pointed out with his project Megapixels, the definition of "celebrity"
was quite broad. The database also contained photos of "journalists, artists,
musicians, activists, policy makers, writers, and academics," Harvey wrote.

MS-Celeb-1M's webpage is currently offline, but before the database was quietly
pulled, it was used far and wide to train facial recognition programs. Entities
that made use of images in the database, according to Harvey, include Chinese
tech firms such as SenseTime and Megvii, which have been linked to the Chinese
state's use of facial recognition to track and oppress ethnic minorities.

[...]

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