The Follies of Microsoft and Facial Recognition

Investigation into Microsoft has revealed that the company released thousands of people’s faces, without their consent, to advance facial recognition. Those faces are still present on the internet. In 2016 the company decided to release 10 million images of 100,000 celebrities’ faces, the largest face database in the world, called MS-Celeb-1M. This was done in hopes to advance facial recognition.

The inherent issue was compounded by the fact that the ‘celebrity’ faces they claimed to release were not, in fact, only celebrities and the database contained the faces of many regular people including journalists, artists, activists, and academics.