As someone who has done license clearance while employed by IBM I can assure you that their legal team is all about following the rules on this stuff. That sai

As someone who has done license clearance while employed by IBM I can assure you that their legal team is all about following the rules on this stuff. That said, from the article you have this: "NBC News obtained IBM’s dataset from a source after the company declined to share it, saying it could be used only by academic or corporate research groups." which tells me that IBM has restricted distribution to non-commercial activities, and this "To build its Diversity in Faces dataset, IBM says it drew upon a collection of 100 million images published with Creative Commons licenses that Flickr’s owner, Yahoo, released as a batch for researchers to download in 2014. So they started with a data set that someone else had re-licensed for this purpose already. (That would be Yahoo!) Back in the day, Yahoo!'s terms of service for Flickr were that you gave Yahoo! its own license to your work and could specify the license that others got if they downloaded your work. So I can imagine that it is entirely possible/legal for Yahoo! to exercise their rights under that ToS to relicense the photos how they saw fit (and remember Verizon/Yahoo! was trying to make the asset as valuable as possible, and this would contribute positively to that effort). I expect that somewhere someone has sold the old classmates.com archives of images and/or digitized a few thousand yearbooks for images. It is not too hard to find sources of hundreds of images where the include a head shot, are all equally lit, and have a small number of backgrounds to remove to leave just the facial features.