Microsoft deletes face recognition database | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft deletes face recognition database

bbc.co.uk

175 pointschwolfe47 comments

(Throwaway due to my employment.)

Meanwhile this[0] was posted on some of the entrances to the common buildings on Microsoft's campus for some time. They seemed to be training an algorithm for "fairness" by taking video of employees that were entering via certain doors. You could "opt out" by choosing another entrance though.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/qYuelxD

Silence is not consent, its a basic rule in the photography class I took. Microsoft seems to be going by the legal minimums, getting a dataset skewed by whoever is employed in that building (likely not terribly diverse).

I haven't even read the book but for some reason this reminds me of the bit in Philip K Dick's Ubik where the main character dismantles his sentient door that demands to be paid before it will open.

> “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

> Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

Where does the fairness come in? Not quite understanding

Same story, different actors: Company throws Machine Learning at a problem, gets a good data set for training, uncovers horrifying implications (the data set is racist, the tools enable abuses of power, the model is incomprehensible, the tool is spreading anti-vax messages to sell more ads).

Meanwhile Amazon is rolling full-steam-ahead on developing facial recognition technologies and making no exception to handing them out to countries with track records for human rights abuses.

It's depressing how even when some companies are doing the right thing at their own expense, others delve straight into unrestricted greed with no regard for human lives.

>unrestricted greed with no regard for human lives.

well that has basically always been amazon's m.o.

We're leveraging Amazon facial recognition for a time tracking kiosk, and it's scary creepy how good their technology has become.

We'd tried it a few years ago and it was too unreliable, but now it's amazingly accurate.

What's the deal with this time tracking kiosk?

To replace punch-in/punch-out machines or sign-in/sign-out sheets, perhaps.

"Kiosk mode" is an upcoming feature for our time tracking app (https://busybusy.com)

The elevator pitch is to make it so when the employee uses the device, the app can recognize who they are, and depending on how the organization has configured the app, either automatically clock them in or out, or just use the facial recognition as an authentication factor

Our focus is on construction related companies (CAT Ventures is one of our investors), where we've had demand for an old school feeling time clock experience, but with modernized features. Our app right now is oriented around each employee using a personal phone, but many job sites, especially with heavy equipment, don't want people carrying personal phones around.

I would quit any job that implemented something like that. Having your day logged down to second sounds horrendous.

You do know that most hourly jobs have you clock in and out either at a kiosk or computer? This is just using facial recognition instead of a password to clock in and out.

Why not time cards that are punched by a machine? The tech to scan them in for payroll already exists, I'm sure. Reminds me of the push for replacing paper ballots for no good reason.

Cheating is possible - others clocking in for you

Cheating is possible - others clocking in for you

Having someone else clock in for your isn't always cheating. For example, leaving early so you can drop by the post office on your way home from work to drop off the company mail.

Or the opposite where my wife works: People will punch in for her because she has to go to an off-site meeting or event.

For the same reason some people want to use Machine Learning to do code reviews, rather than.. you know, have the team pair program and review each other. Providing solutions to problems nobody had. And making new businesses out of old ideas. Kinda like "url shortener in php" -> "url shorterer in nodejs" -> "url shortener in golang" -> "url shortener in rust" -> "url shortener serverless with aws lambda" -> the cycle goes on. New stars for old ideas. Newtimers excited, oldtimers cynical alike.

We have the technology.

Why not time cards that are punched by a machine

I know a factory in Chicago that still has huge time-card punching machine from the late 1800's. It's enormous, and looks like a cast iron wheel of fortune. Very cool.

Somehow the company has managed to function for 150 years without adding facial recognition to it.

Those systems are fun but not practical anymore. Anything you can do on a network connected computer will be faster, easier, cheaper, etc.

I used to think the same way. Recently I started my own consultancy business, and the first thing I did was write a small shell script to track my comings and goings - to the second, so that I'd have good billing data. It has saved me an amazing amount of bookkeeping, and I regret not doing this twenty years ago.

Previously, I spent I don't know how much time going "now, how long did I actually work last Monday?" whenever I've tried to figure out whether I've worked enough or not (there was, of course, a target hours/week in my contract when I was employed). Now I know, at the push of the button: I worked eight hours, sixteen minutes and three seconds. OK, then!

Any chance of sharing that script?

Sounds like fun tech, albeit creepy af. I can see the benefits of using facial recognition for employee tracking, but I hope employers understand that they're asking more from their employees than what's normal. I would consider requiring this tech to be an extraordinary breach of personal privacy, and the company would have to compensate extra for forcing me to use it.

If that's all factored in then sure, this could be pretty useful.

This would be good for the test-taking portion of an online course.

The way this story is different is that the company's reaction was "Fuck, delete this" instead of "Fuck, we're rich!"

Q: "Why is this database unavailable"

A: "Because we don't have anyone to maintain it"

News Media: "Microsoft deletes database".

Does anyone feel like today's news articles, are written by gossip/tabloid writers?

If making access to the database available was a priority, surely a company with Microsoft's resources could find someone to maintain it?

And why shouldn't the database continue to work just because there isn't someone to maintain it? It's not like the maintainer is actually hand-cranking the generator that powers the database server.

And yeah there's definitely a trend with trying to make every news story look like a big dramatic news event with lots of intrigue and "tea". Mostly it's just pretty boring and undramatic stuff.

Some companies try to offer services that actually work. in general I don't think a team should have less than seven people on it if they're on an on call rotation and keeping a service alive without burning out the people involved. And if you can't afford that for a service and you're not really doing the right thing for the users of it.

Also if it's not being used why would you keep it up and running.

finally not sure why you're against someone getting rid of a facial recognition database

Because it generates clicks and clicks mean money.

The concept of real value was thrown out a long time ago.

At least in terms of their online coverage, BBC News' reporting has been thoroughly mediocre on all issues for a long time.

> Last year Microsoft President Brad Smith asked the US Congress to take on the task of regulating the use of facial recognition systems because they had "broad societal ramifications and potential for abuse".

> More recently, Microsoft rejected a request from police in California to use its face-spotting systems in body cameras and cars.

Sounds like they are actually starting to get some principles and are standing up for them.

I'm surprised at the title. Microsoft only said the database was "unavailable" because someone left the company.

Are there any citations or press releases of Microsoft saying it was deleted?

This is both vague and slightly unsettling:

Microsoft told the FT the database was no longer available, because the person who curated it had now left the company.

>Microsoft only said the database was "unavailable" because someone left the company.

People champion pet projects all the time. At my company we joke that every major website UI redesign is just another VP pissing on the web portal fire hydrant.

Without a key person to pitch the value of this project's continued existence it got killed.

Edit: If MS is anything like the BigCo I work at those servers are gonna be wiped and re-imaged after a bunch of automated "these servers were owned by X who has left the company, do you still need them?" emails are ignored by X's boss.

this reply adds nothing to answer the question of whether or not the database was truly deleted

It happened in a research lab, hardly the typical BigCo scenario.

Something similar happened at a billion dollar company where I worked.

I ran their web site. When my job got outsourced, I got exactly four minutes notice before being shown the door. I was (and still am) the only one with the password for the domain registrar. The people who own the company have too much arrogance and pride to call me to ask for the password so they can give it to the Indian company that replaced me, so after several weeks of the web site not being updated with the current pricing (which changed almost daily), they opened a new domain.

As of last month, my site still sits there as a time capsule with the old pricing, employee bios, and everything from six years ago. I can understand why the domain hasn't changed, because they paid for 10 years in advance. But I don't know why they're still paying the hosting bill.

What’s amazing about this is the short sightedness of the company. If they just paid you a decent severance, I’m almost sure that you would have been more than willing to help them.

If they just paid you a decent severance, I’m almost sure that you would have been more than willing to help them.

Nope. No severance. And as I mentioned, almost zero notice. Just "Turn in your badge," and my immediate boss telling me that the project was already outsourced a week earlier.

Something similar happened when I worked at a small town radio station in Wisconsin. This was back when computers were just coming to small business, and people set BIOS passwords and used those round keys to lock their computers. When I got shown the door, nobody asked me for the password or the key to my computer. They just said here's your last check, get out. I heard from one of the DJ's a few weeks later that they ended up chucking out the computer and buying a new one.

I worked for an employer where everyone quit in unison when it was revealed he had refused to pay taxes for nearly a decade, the company account was being levied by the IRS, people hadn't been paid.

The company was run poorly and the passwords to most services were held by random people in the company. He did get the key to the kingdom (the domain name) but he's just too incompetent to realize that with domain ownership he can just set up new email hosting and use password reset on all the services... Instead he keeps making legal threats to get things he trivially can get access to himself.

It looks like this was done at Microsoft Research Asia as a research project. It isn't weird that research projects implode when the researchers working on them leave the lab, whether in Beijing or Redmond, since these things were never in production in the first place. For all we know, this was just an intern project (though it looks like everyone in the paper list are FTEs).

"Database" seems like the wrong word for the headline. Did they delete the training data (the photos and labels)? The models trained on the data? Both? The article only appears to talk about the training set.

If they only deleted the training data, but not the ML models generated from them, then you get the worst of both worlds (people still using the models to do things, and no way to validate or improve the fairness of said models by adding or removing labelled training data).

Whether they did or not, the data was publicly available for some time, so you'll see mirrors around. However, on longer timelines both model and training data are less useful, which I think is the actual outcome here.

>Did they delete the training data (the photos and labels)? The models trained on the data? Both?

It would be interesting to find out if that were the case, considering that it forms the basis of Azure ML Ops (along with Pipelines), introduced at Build a month ago, with an aim to track assets and create an 'end-to-end' audit trail.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/take-your-machine-lea...

I think this is Microsofts way to limit legal, but more importantly, public image liability. These models can be used for bad stuff, like the profiling thats happening in <insert unethical organization/government here> right now. And Microsoft wants nothing to do with it.

You can create an account trillionpairs and access the downloads. It's free and instant.

It's the Asian subset, 4 files, about 300 Gigs.

http://trillionpairs.deepglint.com/overview

addl info

https://megapixels.cc/datasets/msceleb/

> but it added that it also included a lot of people who "must maintain an online presence for their professional lives".

Maybe some of the images in the database were scraped from LinkedIn or GitHub

Anyone have a bittorrent hash for the data set?

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