While the internet has brought us many positives, it has also given us many new fears, such as finding a picture of you on a website without consent. It happened to Scarlett, a resident of Kirkland, Washington, who ended up on the facial recognition search engine PimEyes.
After the photos were removed from the platform, Scarlett also discovered images of her family. As an Ancestry.com user, she discovered that photos of her family members were being pulled from Ancestry and placed in PimEyes.
These images included both living and deceased relatives, and they were of great concern to Scarlett, as she believes the images of the dead could be used to gain more information about the living. Pretty creepy stuff, really.
An Ancestry spokesperson told Wired that the website prohibits “extract data, including photos, from Ancestry sites and services, as well as resell, reproduce or publish any content or information found on Ancestry.”
Advertisement:
The director of PimEyes said: “PimEyes only crawls websites that officially allow us to do so. It was… very unpleasant news that our crawlers somehow broke the rule.” The search engine will now block the Ancestry domain and the indexes associated with it.