Microsoft, Duke, and Stanford quietly delete databases with millions of faces

Now comes word that Microsoft has deleted its facial recognition database of more than 10 million images of some 100,000 people that was reportedly being used by companies to test their facial recognition software. The database, known as MS Celeb, was the largest public facial recognition dataset in the world, amassed by scraping images off the web under a Creative Commons license that allows academic reuse of photos. According to Microsoft Research's paper on the database, it was originally designed to train tools for image captioning and news video analysis. However, after its existence was revealed by Adam Harvey, a Berlin-based artist and researcher, the Financial Times (paywall) ran an in-depth investigation that revealed that giant tech companies like IBM and Panasonic, and Chinese firms such as SenseTime and Megvii, as well as military researchers, were using the massive database to test their facial recognition software. Now Microsoft has quietly taken MS Celeb down.