While the Internet has given us many positive things, it has also given us many new fears, such as finding pictures of ourselves on websites without our consent. That happened to Scarlett, a resident of Kirkland, Washington, who found herself on the facial recognition search engine PimEyes.
After she removed the photo from the platform, Scarlett also found photos of her family there. As a user of Ancestry.com, she discovered that her relative’s photo was taken from Ancestry and placed on PimEyes.
The photos included living and dead relatives, and Scarlett was very concerned because she thought photos of the dead could be used to learn more about the living. Pretty creepy stuff, really.
An Ancestry spokesperson told Wired that the site prohibits “from Ancestry scrapes data, including photos, from the websites and services of Ancestry, and resells, reproduces or publishes any content or information found on Ancestry.
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Director of PimEyes says : “PimEyes only crawls sites that officially allow us to do so. That’s…very unpleasant news that our crawler is breaking the rules somehow . Search engines will now block Ancestry’s function variable names and indexes associated with them.