[floatingatoll]

I’m not asking if they gave up copyright on their photos. They did. I’m asking, for example, if it’s ethically appropriate for Microsoft to publish annotated public domain photos without requiring a human ethical review for each use of their dataset. If I wanted to perform a sociological study on that dataset, I’d have to get a review board’s approval. Why is performing a statistical study (literally, machine learning) somehow exempt from that ethical concern?