According to a report in the Financial Times, Microsoft deleted a database containing 10 million photos that were used to train the company's facial recognition systems. It is believed that the systems trained on these photos were those used by the military and police forces.
The database in question was built in 2016 using 100,000 photos of famous people that were online. Microsoft said the database is no longer available because the person responsible for creating it is no longer associated with the company.
Last year, Microsoft president Brad Smith had asked the US Congress to take on the task of regulating the use of facial recognition systems, as it could have many negative impacts on society.
California police recently asked Microsoft for permission to use its facial recognition systems in cars and body cameras, but the company refused to grant this request.
The massive database, called MSCeleb, was created from photos of famous people found online. The Megapixels project, which is used to detect the photos for the database, says most of the photos belong to American and British actors, but the company also used images of people whose professions expose them to social media.
This means that the photos included artists, journalists, musicians, activists, researchers and writers. Although the database is no longer available from Microsoft, those who have downloaded a copy of it can still use it. According to Adam Harvey, who worked on the Megapixels project, the data in a database cannot simply disappear when the database is deleted, as copies of it continue to be stored on users' hard drives.
