This article originally appeared on VICE US.
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.
In a statement to the Financial Times, Microsoft said that the database was taken down simply “because the research challenge is over." Even so, it's doubtful that the MS-Celeb-1M database's life is over as well.
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