@Satsuma NYTimes article on how Yahoo used the Flickr Commons collection – which is made up of photos that people CC-licensed – to train machine learning algorithms. And some discussion on Flickr about it.
Yeah, the use that the tech has been put to is in many cases creepy and unethical. But the source data was made up of images that people specifically said, “do whatever you want with this.”
The bigger question, IMO, is whether the *subjects* of the photos would have agreed to this use. Not an issue when you’re training computers to identify trees, buildings, cars, sheep, birds, etc. but definitely an issue with face recognition – both ethically and legally.
That’s also part of the article, but the discussion I’ve seen so far seems to be focused on “you used my photos!”