Microsoft built a database of more than 10 million images featuring roughly 100,000 people back in 2016 and today Microsoft quietly deleted this database, dubbed as MS Celeb, from the internet.
The database, known as MS Celeb, was published in 2016 and described by the company as the largest publicly available facial recognition data set in the world. The people whose photos were used were not asked for their consent.
“The world is on the threshold of technology that would give a government the ability to follow anyone anywhere,” Brad Smith, the President of Microsoft, warned in November 2018, calling for facial recognition software to be regulated.
Microsoft used this facial data to train its facial recognition systems, including those used by U.S. military researchers, and by various firms in China — SenseTime and Megvii among them. These two companies are suppliers to Chinese officials in Xinjiang, where facial recognition tech and artificial intelligence has been used to track and imprison minority groups like Uighurs and Muslims. Sensetime was valued at more than $4.5 billion as of late 2018, and its SenseTotem and SenseFace systems are used by various Chinese police departments. Megvii’s Face++ tech was actually cited in a Human Rights Watch report as a provider to the Integrated Joint Operations Platform—a police app used in Xinjiang. However, the group then amended its report that the Face++ account in the IJOP code had never been actively used. In a New York Times report, both companies denied direct knowledge of their software being used to racially profile minorities in China.
“Unless we act, we risk waking up five years from now to find that facial recognition services have spread in ways that exacerbate societal issues,” Microsoft chief counsel Brad Smith wrote in a blog post.