Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines

by Joy Buolamwini

By the time someone finds out their images have been used, the company has already trained the AI system, so deleting the image doesn’t delete its contribution to training the AI system to do a specific task. Even if the image is deleted, the many copies of the dataset already made still contain the images. This is why when Meta (then Facebook) announced the deletion of nearly 1 billion faceprints, there was pushback alongside the celebration. The celebration was around the fact that a major tech company deleting the faceprints was an acknowledgment of the risks associated with face-based technologies that many organizations, including the AJL, had been highlighting. But we do not know if someone at the organization made a secret backup copy, and we may never know. Facebook’s actions provided a counternarrative to the assumption that once a company has your data there is nothing that can be done about it. Public pressure makes a difference, and so too does legislation and litigation. While the company deleted the faceprints, they did not delete the facial recognition models created with those faceprints. The company had legal reasons to rid themselves of the faceprints. In 2021, Facebook reached a $650 million settlement for allegations of violating BIPA, the Biometric Information Privacy Act of Illinois.[13] Crucially, faceprints are derived from images of a person’s face, but they are not a copy of the uploaded images. Think of the faceprint as a digital representation o...