Did You Upload Photos of Your Children Onto Flickr?

People who uploaded photos to Flickr may have unwittingly participated in the development of facial recognition technology by companies using their images without permission or authorization.

According to a recent New York Times story, approximately 700,000 images were acquired from the popular social media and photo-sharing website by a MegaFace, a facial recognition database. Dozens of companies and government agencies have downloaded these images for programming facial recognition software, which is being used to monitor and spy on average citizens.

How Did This Happen?

Yahoo, who recently paid $117 million to settle a massive data breach, acquired Flickr in 2005. Nine years later, Yahoo uploaded these images into a large photo database in order to “empower the research community by giving them a robust database.” However, users were not informed about this. Reportedly, there was a “fail-safe” built-in: what researchers had access to were links to the photos, not the photos themselves. That way, if a user chose to delete a photo or make it “private,” it was no longer accessible. However, this fail-safe did not prevent researchers who acquired images to pass them on to others. This is how MegaFace was able to get hold of their images.

What is “MegaFace”?

The MegaFace database was created by two professors and a small group of graduate assistants and undergraduate web developers. Today, that database contains approximately 4.7 million photos of 672,000 unique individuals that are available for use in “training” computers in facial recognition.

The MegaFace images acquired from Flickr continue to be available to the public.

What Is Being Done With my Images?

According to the NYT story, the Chinese government has been using MegaFace photos to develop surveillance technology that is being used to track and monitor Uighurs, an ethnic minority living in the country’s western region. Another company, known as NtechLab, has been using these photos to identify strangers and “out” adult film stars in Russia.

Can I Get My Photos Removed From MegaFace?

Although the photo files contain identifiers connecting them to their original Flickr accounts, most people whose photos have been used are unaware that they have been shared with government agencies, corporations and software developers. Unfortunately, there is no way for people to have their images taken down from MegaFace, and the developers of the database have “moved on” to other projects.

Are Flickr Photos the Only Ones That are Being Used?

In March of 2019, NBC News reported that researchers working on facial recognition are freely downloading images from Facebook, YouTube and virtually any internet site to which they have access.

Do I Have Any Recourse?

One of the problems is that there are few federal regulations governing the use of facial recognition technology. However, depending on where you live, state privacy laws may offer some ammunition with which to bring legal action against any person or entity that has used your Flickr images without your permission, such as Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. Images of children under 13 may also be protected by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Join a Free Flickr Facial Recognition Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you had a Flickr account and you uploaded pictures onto that account, those images may have been given to MegaFace and used for facial recognition purposes without your permission, and you may qualify to join this Flickr facial recognition class action lawsuit investigation.

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.