“The people whose photos were used were not asked for their consent, their images were scraped off the web from search engines and videos under the terms of the Creative Commons license that allows academic reuse of photos.”

Is it ethically acceptable to republish someone's CC-licensed face annotated for the purpose of training recognition algorithms?

Is the dataset inclusive as a composite whole? Does it have biases such as “primarily white-male” or “majority white”?

Should facial recognition data and training studies of people’s faces be required to adhere to the same ethical review practices that psychology and sociology studies of people are required to adhere to?

If I were Microsoft, I would red flag every one of these questions as reason enough to take it down immediately until answered.