Some. But then there's this thing:

> By law, most Americans in the database don’t need to be asked for their permission — but the Papas should have been.

> As residents of Illinois, they are protected by one of the strictest state privacy laws on the books: the Biometric Information Privacy Act, a 2008 measure that imposes financial penalties for using an Illinoisan’s fingerprints or face scans without consent. Those who used the database — companies including Google, Amazon, Mitsubishi Electric, Tencent and SenseTime — appear to have been unaware of the law, and as a result may have huge financial liability, according to several lawyers and law professors familiar with the legislation.

IANAL, but I would be surprised if attaching a Creative Commons license to a photo qualified as consent under regulations about use of biometrics.

Read the article more closely - at least one person they interviewed specifically assigned it the non-commercial Creative Commons license which means pictures shouldn't be used for things like what mega face is doing (clearly for commercial purposes!)

They're using it for academic research, which is noncommercial by some definitions. The companies that used it only used it to participate in the competition.

Most people are not legal analysts. Your snarky characterization of this overlooks the fact that what can be anticipated at the time consent is given may be overtaken by technological developments, that corporations often structure their activities legally so that 'research' is non-commercial even if it is intended to be used later for commercial activity, and that it's polite to ask before doing something you might hesitate to grant consent for yourself.

People need to be able to say: "oops, undo this permission thing that I clicked OK to, as I now better understand the ramifications of what I clicked ... and I don't like it"

So you should be able to do things like un-GPL code you’ve published?

Do you think people should be able to undo other legal agreements like mortages?

You can cancel a mortgage within the first 14 days in the UK for this specific reason.

There's also a lot of rules to try and make sure the person really understands what it is they are signing up for, with mandated forms etc. And then as you say there's still a cooling off period.

I wonder how everyone would react if Facebook did that with their biggest open source framework.

Facebook is not "people", we can keep companies and individuals to different standards.

Facebook employs lots of lawyers. They are well advised when they make decisions with legal implications.

“people specifically opted in to...”

Do you say the same of yourself when you sign up for a random online service and blindly check the “Accept TOS” checkbox?

Contracts and licenses are sometimes tricky to unequivocally enforce when one party entered into the contract or granted a license by mistake, unknowingly, etc.

On Flickr (where the photos came from), the default license is "All Rights Reserved". To apply a Creative Commons license, you need to go into a menu and select the license you want from a list. So that's why I said they "specifically opted in".

Ok Bill, for 4 hours a day you're going to work on this non-commercial academic open github repo and push your things in there and then the next 4 hours you're going to pull it into our for-profit solution where you will take things further. remember if you think of anything that will really be of benefit to the company don't do it until the second 4 hour slot!

See, I know this is the case but I think that people intended "you can use this for reasonable causes". Like, if you lend your buddy your car there's an implicit "don't Rob the bank" in there. Like if you CC release a picture with your child visible in the background and someone cut and paste that kid's photo on a naked body you'd be like "what the fuck, man?!" There's an implicit impression of reasonableness that isn't necessarily enforced by the licence.

It's a pity, I think if these fears propagate there'll be less CC content.

Like most privacy issues the issue is scale. None of these people ever explicitly consented to the use of their data this way. Change is often sensible when encountering new information or understanding of an existing situation.

Hell, I can't believe you're expressing any confusion. This is a pretty simple abuse of trust, apparently attributable to Flickr/Yahoo. It's almost like it's completely normal to not base your emotional reaction on copyright licenses—the outrage is legitimate no matter how legally protected the abuser is.

Those CC licences are all about copyright. The article is mostly about privacy and data protection. If I take a photograph of another person I can give away my copyright but I can't give away the other person's privacy rights. If that person lives in the EU probably even they can't give away their privacy rights: permission to use personal data is revocable according to the GDPR, I think, in most cases.

I wonder of any of the people whose photographs are in the database have moved to the EU and whether that makes any difference.