Expose.AI: from Flickr to facial recognition

Cade Metz and Kashmir Hill at The New York Times wrote about how old Flickr photos became a part of facial recognition datasets. The story centers around Exposing.AI, a tool that can show you whether your face is a featured in any popular facial recognition datasets like VGG Face, MegaFace and FaceScrub, based on your Flickr username or a photo URL. Beyond that, it’s a good read that goes into how, five to ten years ago when AI was not yet very influential, commercial and university labs were building lots of different facial recognition datasets and, in the spirit of open science, sharing them publicly on the internet. Only now that it’s becoming clear that facial recognition systems are biased — as I covered last summer in Is it enough for only big tech to pull out of facial recognition? and Facial recognition false arrest — some of these datasets are being taken offline. But these systems exist now, and taking down the datasets won’t stop them from being used; only regulation will.