University of Washington has ceased distributing the MegaFace dataset citing the challenge has concluded and that maintenance of their platform would be too burdensome. June 11, 2020: MegaFace dataset is now decommissioned.This would amount to 3,311,471 violations of Creative Commons licenses for each commercial use of the dataset if it were to be enforced. But all 3,311,471 images required some form of attribution, of which none was provided by the MegaFace dataset nor any of the research projects that used it. To understand which licenses were applied to the images in the MegaFace dataset we analyzed the metadata for all 3,311,471 images from 48,383 Flickr accounts and found that 69% (2,284,369) of the images prohibited commercial use, while only 31% (1,027,102) allowed it. According to the press release from the University of Washington, 'more than 300 research groups working with MegaFace' as of 2016, including multiple law enforcement agencies. This analysis explores how the MegaFace face recognition dataset exploited the good intentions of Flickr users and the Creative Commons license system to advance facial recognition technologies around the world by companies including Alibaba, Amazon, Google, CyberLink, IntelliVision, N-TechLab (FindFace.pro), Mitsubishi, Orion Star Technology, Philips, Samsung 1, SenseTime, Sogou, Tencent, and Vision Semantics to name only a few. All photos included a Creative Commons licenses, but most were not licensed for commercial use. It includes 4,753,320 faces of 672,057 identities from 3,311,471 photos downloaded from 48,383 Flickr users' photo albums.

MegaFace is a large-scale public face recognition training dataset that serves as one of the most important benchmarks for commercial face recognition vendors.

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