According to a report released Thursday, Microsoft a huge face recognition database, which had about 10 million images with the participation of about 100 thousand people. This base was called Microsoft Celeb and was created in 2016. Her task was to save photos of celebrities around the world. Among them were journalists, musicians, various activists, politicians, writers and so on.
The reason for the deletion was the illegal use of this data for Chinese facial recognition software. It was reportedly used to spy on the Uyghur Muslim minority in the country. The Chinese companies SenseTime and Megvii were responsible for the project and were given access to the database.
Given that the data was hosted under a Creative Commons license, any companies and developers could access it. In particular, it was used by IBM, Panasonic, Alibaba, NVIDIA and Hitachi.
At the same time, we note that earlier Microsoft has already demanded to tighten the regulation of facial recognition technologies. They also said that the site with the database was intended for academic purposes and was removed after solving the necessary research tasks.
In addition, similar databases of Stanford and Duke universities were removed from the Web. Another likely reason is the company's concerns that facial recognition systems could exacerbate social problems.
Note that this topic has been raised more than once in different countries, but so far there is no universal solution to this.
Source: 3dnews.ru