Description

9,231,981 Flickr photos from 28 image datasets

Exposing.ai provides a search engine to check if one’s Flickr photos were used in dozens of the most widely used and cited public face and biometric image datasets used for these purposes.

Background

Exposing.ai is based on years of research about image training datasets used for face recognition and related biometric analysis technologies.

Through investigating the systems developed for facial recognition technologies a pattern emerged: the algorithms were being trained on hundreds of millions of images scraped from the internet, mostly from Flickr.com where permissive and unprotected “Creative Commons” licenses were routinely and deliberately exploited for biometric data.

This website helps tell a small part of the story about what face recognition is and how it became powerful, and how Creative Commons continues to play a major role in biometric data proliferation.

Flickr.com users that uploaded photos containing faces or other biometric information between 2004 and 2020 may have had their photos used to train, test, or enhance artificial intelligence surveillance technologies for use in academic, commercial, or defense related applications.

Exposing.ai provides a search engine to check if one’s Flickr photos were used in dozens of the most widely used and cited public face and biometric image datasets used for these purposes.

Although Exposing.ai searches millions of records, it is not a fully comprehensive search for all image training datasets. Only datasets that were publicly accessible, include Flickr images, and included metadata are searchable on Exposing.ai. Countless more face recognition training datasets exist and are continuously being scraped from social media, news, and entertainment sites. Future versions may expand to include more search options.

Development

Developed by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace, on the basis of predecessor megapixels.cc—with support from the VolkswagenStiftung through HfG Karlsruhe’s KIM research group, as well as Mozilla Foundation, Weizenbaum Institut, and Copenhagen Business School.

Adapted from About, Exposing.ai