Privacy fears as MILLIONS of photos used to train facial recognition AI without users' consent

Many facial recognition systems are being trained using millions of online photos uploaded by everyday people and, more often than not, the photos are being taken without users' consent, an NBC News investigation has found. In one worrying case, IBM scraped almost a million photos from unsuspecting users on Flickr to build its facial recognition database. The practice not only raises privacy concerns, but also fuels fears that the systems could one day be used to disproportionately target minorities. Many facial recognition systems are being trained using millions of online photos uploaded by everyday people and, more often than not, the photos are being taken without users' consent IBM's database, called'Diversity in Faces,' was released in January as part of the company's efforts to'advance the study of fairness and accuracy in facial recognition technology.' The database was released following a study from MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini, which found that popular facial recognition services from Microsoft, IBM and Face vary in accuracy based on gender and race.