Microsoft Corp. this week discreetly pulled a facial recognition database from the internet, according to a report published Thursday.

Built back in 2016, the database known as MS Celeb at one point contained 10 million images featuring about 100,000 people, said to be the largest database of its kind. It was only supposed to contain celebrities, but according to one researcher photos of “journalists, artists, musicians, activists, policy makers, writers, and academics” were also in the database.

Such images can be pulled from the internet under the Creative Commons license, meaning people could have ended up in the database without knowing about it. It seems China was the country that made the most use of those images.

Chinese tech firms SenseTime and Megvii both used the database. Both those companies, according to The New York Times have supplied facial recognition technology to the Chinese government. That report states that the government has used the software to keep tabs on ethnic minorities.

Suffice to say, it’s not a good look for Microsoft, a company that has been outspoken concerning how facial recognition could be misused in matters of surveillance. In April, the company said it turned down an opportunity to share its facial recognition technology with U.S. law enforcement amid fears it could breach human rights.

“The site was intended for academic purposes,” Microsoft said in a statement to The Financial Times. “It was run by an employee that is no longer with Microsoft and has since been removed.”

One journalist in that report said he was unhappy about his inclusion in the dataset, saying, “Microsoft’s inability to hold their own researchers to integrity and probity that this was not torpedoed before it left the building.”

Microsoft added that the dataset was taken down once “the challenge was over,” although it’s not completely expunged.

“Despite the recent termination of the msceleb.org website, the dataset still exists in several repositories on GitHub, the hard drives of countless researchers, and will likely continue to be used in research projects around the world,” Berlin-based researcher Adam Harvey wrote as part of his project, MegaPixels. The project clearly outlines who used the project and also gives names of those whose images were used.

Image: Microsoft