IBM and other companies are using Creative Commons Flickr photos to train facial recognition software without the consent of people in the photos
People's faces are being used without their permission, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say.
Context & Ripple Effects
IBM's use of Creative Commons Flickr photos exposed a structural gap in how face data gets sourced: the license governs attribution and reuse of the image, not the consent of the person pictured. Creative Commons itself confirmed days later that copyright cannot block this kind of use, pushing the privacy question into policy rather than licensing.
The practice is not an outlier. NIST's own benchmark draws on images of immigrants, visa applicants, abused children, and dead people without consent (per Slate), and the Financial Times has since catalogued the wide universe of face datasets universities and US agencies hand out on request — meaning IBM is one instance of a supply chain with no consent layer anywhere in it.
First-order effects
- People photographed under Creative Commons licenses have no contractual or copyright lever against IBM's use of their faces, while IBM obtains large-scale training data at essentially zero acquisition cost.
Second-order effects
- Rivals building on similar datasets inherit the liability: the later lawsuits accusing Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft of violating Illinois biometric law show the exposure converts directly into litigation once a state statute covers the training data.
Third-order effects
- With regulators largely absent — Fortune reports collection practices remain unaddressed amid a heating market — the binding constraint shifts from copyright to state privacy statutes and platform-level dataset curation, forcing vendors to either secure consent or accept per-state legal risk.
The trend: Facial recognition training data is migrating from freely scraped public archives toward consent-gated sourcing as biometric privacy statutes turn legacy datasets into liabilities.