While I understand the outrage and fully understand it, I'd like to offer another reason why child faces are in use - sex trafficking. My previous research was in face recognition and mostly in artificial face aging algorithms. One of the trouble areas in that domain was predicting how child would look after X years. This is due to the elasticity of child faces. The DOD offered grants for this type of research to help thwart child abduction and sex trafficking.<p>Obviously this was before all of these types of stories began to emerge, but I like to bring this up as an opposing ethical debate.
So... people specifically opted in to release their photos under a Creative Commons license, and now they're outraged that people are using the photos under the terms of the license?<p>And some of them chose a license that required attribution, and now they're outraged that the photos are attributed to them?
It's a mistake to think that checking a box that says "CC" means you actually had permission to issue a license.<p>If you're selling stock photos, you need written consent for everything in the photo--artwork, brands, people. Interestingly, parents <i>can</i> give consent for their kids to be in a photograph, but these same identifiers can be used years later to identify the adults in the photos.<p>A related question is this: do pre-trained classifiers reveal any personally-identifying information? Or are they only statistics about many, many faces?