Megaface
One of the difficulties with these training datasets is the currently understood rules around web scraping. The current legal precedent [0] is that web scraping is perfectly legal, despite what is in the websites terms of service, "licence" or robots.txt. If a human can navigate to it freely, you can scrape it using automated means.What you can't do with scraped data is republish it verbatim. Doing a data analysis on scraped data is permitted by law, and you can publish your analysis of that data.The question is, is an AI model trained on scraped data a derived analysis that is therefore legal? Or is it republishing of the original data? We need a test case to find out.In the case of this dataset, I don't think the CC license applies to people using it. It "may" apply to redistribution of it for free. If the dataset was sold, that would be a violation. I suspect (after tested in court) a model trained on this dataset would be allowed despite the CC license on the photos.Personally, in this case I think the ethics committee of the University should have put up barriers to the project. The morals of this are questionable at best.0: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/