Microsoft Removes Face Recognition Photos Amid Privacy Controversy

Until April, Microsoft boasted of having the largest collection of faces that anyone could use to train facial-recognition algorithms. Since then, the once publicly-available dataset has quietly disappeared. As the Financial Times reports, Microsoft quietly deleted the dataset after the paper called attention to privacy and ethical issues, including use of the dataset by military researchers and Chinese surveillance firms. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune. But it told the Financial Times: "The site was intended for academic purposes. It was run by an employee that is no longer with Microsoft and has since been removed."