Photo apps are becoming increasingly popular, but think twice before using them.
Consumer Reports: Are Your Photos Putting Your Privacy at Risk?
Lensa AI is reportedly at the top of Apple and Google’s app charts. The app uses artificial intelligence to tweak or completely change your appearance. Some experts have taken issue with Lensa’s terms of service, which grant broad rights to license images.
“Such apps use AI models trained on images scraped from the internet and uploaded by people who never considered, let alone intended, for their photos to be processed in this way,” Irina Raicu, director of internet ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, told Lifewire in an email interview. “Users of such apps then upload photos of themselves to create their ‘avatars,’ and those photos are used to further refine the underlying model for future users.”
Like many software applications, photo apps ask you to give up many rights when you accept their terms of use. For example, part of Lensa's terms of use states: "By posting or submitting to the Site or otherwise disclosing to us any User Data, you grant us a royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use all such User Data in whole or in part, and in any form, media, or technology whether now known or later developed."
