Microsoft removed its facial recognition database which started in 2016

Microsoft, one of the biggest tech giants has removed a huge number of entries of facial recognition from it’s database, which contained more than 10 million images. These images were of more than 1,00,000 people from the internet. Although the database has been removed but the traces of the data trove on the internet still remains.

According to a report by Financial Times, the tech giant has released MS-Celeb-1M which is a dataset of around 10 million photos from 1,00,000 people. This data were collected from the internet from 2016 onwards. Furthermore, the facial recognition database is designed to contain the photos of celebrities. But according to Adam Harvey, a Berlin-based researcher said that the definition of ‘celebrity’ was quite broad, he pointed this out using his project called Megapixels.

Microsoft said that, the image database was taken down because the research challenge was over. According to the tech giant Microsoft, it is doubtful that the MS-Celeb-1M database’s life is over as well.

As mentioned before, the facial recognition database contained images of celebrities, other than them it also contained pictures of “journalists, artists, musicians, activists, policy makers, writers, and academics”. It should be noted that the pictures of people used and stored in the facial recognition database did not have permission and consent from people if they wanted it to be included. The images were taken from the internet itself under the Creative Commons License.

In other news, Microsoft earlier revealed that Windows had a security vulnerability which left it open for worm or other threat attacks. These attacks could become widespread by going from one vulnerable PC to the other. The new attacks could be similar to the massive spread of the WannaCry malware which had affected more than thousand PCs. Although Microsoft has released patches and fixes for Windows including the older one like Windows XP, according to the company, around 1 million PCs which are connected to the internet can still be attacked.

Although the new security flaw of Windows system could not be exploited, as said by the company but that doesn’t mean that the security flaw won’t harm the users.

The WannaCry attacks happened around two months after the company released new patches for the EternalBlue exploit. The EternalBlue exploit affected a number of machines and its exploits were leaked online which allowed the hackers to create the malware targeting the exact exploit.

EternalBlue exploit was leaked publicly, and this allowed hackers to create malware freely. The new BlueKeep flaw has not been disclosed publicly, however, that does not imply that there would be no malware.