A Wired investigation has found that the face finder based on artificial intelligence, pimeyesused photos of people who died without permission taken from the web ancestry. He used them as AI trainingas well as to index people and their relatives.
It is increasingly clear that a good part of the artificial intelligence models have used photos and drawings protected by copyright to fatten your database. Or, even more serious, private photosas is the case with pimeyesa very popular face search engine.
It must not be very nice looking for your face on web pages and having a private photo of your deceased twin brother come out. Or that you can keep track of your relatives and their photos, without those people having given their permission.
PimEyes, and the lack of respect for the deceased
pimeyes is a people face finder. You upload a photo, and it tells you in which web and Internet documents it appears.
Although it has free trial options, it is a paid service What does he charge 20 euros by a single searcheither 35.99 euros per monthif you want to do more.
Ironically, this service is advertised as a way to protect your privacy by looking for sites where your photos are. But they didn’t care much about the privacy of the images that they used for train your AI.
According to the research of Wired, pimeyes use photos of deceased people collected from the web ancestry, an online family tree creation service. Also family relations between them. All this without the permission of Ancestry or the people involved.
As happened this weekend with Cerebral, which has leaked to Meta, TikTok and Google advertising platforms the private mental health data of 3 million patients, including diseases and treatments, the response of pimeyes It’s the classic: “has been inadvertently“.
The startup acknowledges in Wired that it used crawlers to create your database. Are trackers who comb websites that have photos, and copy as many as they can.
“PimEyes only tracks websites that officially allow us to. It was… very unpleasant news that our trackers somehow deviated from the norm.“, explains to Wired Giorgi Gobronidze, director of PimEyes.
When you want to get balls out, blame the software… Despite being an algorithm that does exactly what is asked of it.
Wired has interviewed people affected by this unauthorized use of photos of deceased people: “My sister is dead. She cannot consent or revoke her consent to be enrolled in this“.
After the publication of the investigation, it seems PimEyes has deleted the photos from Ancestryand kinship indexing.
as it counts PetaPixel, is not the first violation of privacy committed by this company. Some time ago she was criticized for accept photos of children in their browser, making it easier to track and harass them.
The use photos of deceased people by pimeyes for train to its artificial intelligence, is doubly critical. First, by using private photos without permission. And second, because most of the photos of ancestry are from Dead peoplewhich belong to family trees created by their relatives for use on that website, not on a people finder.
