This Website Can Tell You If Your Pics Are Training Facial Recognition Systems
If you have pictures of yourself online, there is a chance they are being used to help train facial recognition systems, but a new website is here to save the day.
"Exposing.ai," which was unveiled in January, allows you to check if your photos posted to the photo-sharing site Flickr are being used for this purpose, and you might find it jaw-dropping when you see how many are actually used.
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3,630,582
Flickr photos used for training face recognition technologies
On the website, you'll be able to search through more than 3.6 million photos in six facial-recognition image datasets.
While that number seems small compared to the huge amount of photos circling the internet, you may be surprised to find a pic of yourself mixed in the bunch.
You simply enter your Flickr username, the URL of the photo, or a hashtag to find out if your photos are being used.
Searching hashtags such as #wedding, #birthday, or #party bring up tens of thousands of pictures that have been used to help train facial recognition systems, many of which include children.
Website creator Adam Harvey pointed out to KMOV4 "Exposing.ai" examines a small portion of data that's in use due to many companies not revealing how to obtain their data used to train these systems.
He calls the website just the "tip of the iceberg."