How-old.net is a website that uses Face API technology to guess your age. Over the years, Microsoft Bing Image Search have built some of the best image understanding capabilities in the industry. It was first used in Bing and quickly expanding to other Microsoft products.
According to a programmer explained on Quora.com, there are “mainly 3 key technologies– face detection, gender classification and age detection; face detection is the foundation for the other two. For age detection and gender detection, they are just classic regression and classification problems in machine learning. It involves facial feature representation, collecting training data, building regression/classification models and model optimization.”
To start, all you need is upload a picture to the website, and the algorithm will take care of the rest. Here is a picture of ITP peeps hanging out after one of the finals. 
Here is the verdict.
It was only natural to play around with algorithm, using exactly same picture.
Or different pictures.
Certainly, this website is primarily for people to have fun, at least according to Microsoft. And it was beyond expectation when it goes viral. However, there are ethics issues to think about here.
First, the setting of parameters. In medical imaging technologies like MRI, an image is calculated from data like tiny elecromagnetic distortions. Most doctors take these images as such like they have taken photographs without much bothering about the underlying technology before. Setting of algorithm affects mechanisms of algorithm control. There are many parameters, that the developers of such an algorithmic imaging technology have predefined and that will effect the outcome in an important way. Using the example illustrated above, the happening of internet pseudonymity is just a matter of time, and soon enough, it will be applied in real life.
Second, how to deal with uncertainty and misclassification. Part of the reason this tool seems to have spread so far is that it’s not very accurate, yet. Nothing makes people feel more calm and disinterested than being mistaken for a person 20 years older than them. Currently, face API is just one of the many features that’s presented. While more machine learning and large scale data understanding have led to a new breakthrough of image understanding. In the future, there are many other core capabilities in the API to empower other innovative scenarios. However, when you have an example demonstrated above, for many applications, the only way to understand these presumptions is to “open the black box”.
Fortunately, for this application, Microsoft have made it open through Project Oxford, where you can simply call the web API and get all the necessary information back in JSON format. Even though transparency is one of the most important solutions when it comes to throwing light on the chaos, is it possible and reasonable to make it obligatory to publish the algorithm’s source code? If so, how?