In a story that broke a couple of days ago it was revealed that IBM used about a million open-access photos on Flickr to train their facial recognition software. The first response was in the form of complaints that they didn't inform anybody. Of course, this sort of use occurs all the time, and it's not just faces, and it's not just IBM. Here's a report from IEEE Spectrum about a database of a million video clips of hundreds of common actions called Moments in Time. Facebook is using datasets that include billions of images. And as the Verge notes, the photos IBM usedwere part of "a larger collection of 99.2 million photos, known as the YFCC100M, which former Flickr owner Yahoo originally put together to conduct research." In a statement yesterday, Creative Commons points out that "copyright is not a good tool to protect individual privacy, to address research ethics in AI development, or to regulate the use of surveillance tools employed online." Right. Different principles are at play here, and this is as good a time as any to have a discussion about those principles.
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