It takes a feast of facial imagery to teach a machine how to recognize an individual person.
This is why computer scientists so often use the faces of Hollywood celebrities in their research. Tom Hanks, for example, is in so many publicly available photographs that it’s fairly easy to build a Hanks database for algorithm-training purposes.
Depending on a researcher’s needs, there are many other available databases of human faces—some featuring tens of thousands of images. These collections of faces draw from public records like mugshots, surveillance footage, news photos, Google images, and university studies.
It’s entirely possible that your face is in one of these databases. There’s no way to say for certain that it isn’t.
Your face is yours. It is a defining feature of your identity. But it’s also just another datapoint waiting to be collected. At a time when cameras are ubiquitous and individual data collection is baked into nearly every transaction a person can make, faces are increasingly up for grabs.
Data brokers already buy and sell detailed profiles that describe who you are. They track your public records and your online behavior to figure out your age, your gender, your relationship status, your exact location, how much money you make, which supermarket you shop at, and on and on and on. It’s entirely reasonable to wonder how companies are collecting and using images of you, too.