Ever AI uses the photos to offer “best-in-class face recognition technology,” the company says, which can estimate emotion, ethnicity, gender and age. Instead, in news releases, it describes how the company possesses an “ever-expanding private global dataset of 13 billion photos and videos” from what the company said are tens of millions of users in 95 countries. The Ever AI website makes no mention of “best moments” snapshots. They noted in interviews that millions of people are uploading and sharing photos and personal information online without realizing how the images could be used to develop surveillance products they may not support. But while most facial recognition algorithms are trained on well-established, publicly circulating datasets - some of which have also faced criticism for taking people’s photos without their explicit consent - Ever is different in using its own customers’ photos to improve its commercial technology.įacial recognition companies’ use of photos of unsuspecting people has raised growing concerns from privacy experts and civil rights advocates. Those companies all need access to enormous databases of photos to improve the accuracy of their matching technology. There are many companies that offer facial recognition products and services, including Amazon, Microsoft and FaceFirst.
(That policy was updated on April 15 with more disclosure of how the company uses its customers’ photos.) That’s hugely concerning.”ĭoug Aley, Ever’s CEO, told NBC News that Ever AI does not share the photos or any identifying information about users with its facial recognition customers.Īley also said Ever is clear with users that facial recognition is part of the company’s mission, and noted that it is mentioned in the app’s privacy policy. “They are taking images of people’s families, photos from a private photo app, and using it to build surveillance technology. “This looks like an egregious violation of people’s privacy,” said Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. In other words, what began in 2013 as another cloud storage app has pivoted toward a far more lucrative business known as Ever AI - without telling the app’s millions of users. What isn’t obvious on Ever’s website or app - except for a brief reference that was added to the privacy policy after NBC News reached out to the company in April - is that the photos people share are used to train the company’s facial recognition system, and that Ever then offers to sell that technology to private companies, law enforcement and the military.
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