eyethe Berlin-based photo sharing community that came out last year to a Spanish company freepik After going bankrupt, it is now licensing its users’ photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms and Conditions that would give it rights to upload user content to “train, develop and improve software, algorithms and learning models.” automatic”. .” Users were given 30 days to opt out by removing all of their content from the EyeEm platform. Otherwise, they were consenting to this use case for their work.
At the time of its 2023 acquisition, EyeEm’s photo library included 160 million images and nearly 150,000 users. The company said it would merge its community with Freepik’s over time. Despite its decline, almost 30,000 people still download it every month, according to data from Application Figures.
He was once considered a possible Instagram challenger, or at least “Europe’s Instagram”— EyeEm had been reduced to a staff of three before selling it to Freepik, formerly Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch. reported. Joaquín Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, hinted at the company’s possible plans for EyeEm, saying that he would explore how to bring more AI into the equation for the platform’s creators.
Turns out that meant selling his work to train AI models.
Now, EyeEm Updated terms and conditions says the following:
8.1 Grant of Rights – EyeEm Community
By uploading Content to the EyeEm Community, you grant us with respect to your Content the non-exclusive, worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, transform, adapt, make derivative works of, communicate to the public and/or promote such Content. Content. Content.
This specifically includes the sublicensable and transferable right to use your Content for the training, development and improvement of machine learning software, algorithms and models. If you do not agree to this, you should not add your Content to the EyeEm Community.
The rights granted in this section 8.1 with respect to your Content remain valid until its complete removal from the EyeEm Community and associated platforms in accordance with section 13. You may request removal of your Content at any time. The conditions for this can be found in section 13.
Section 13 details a complicated process for removal that begins with directly deleting the photos, which would not affect content that had previously been shared in EyeEm magazine or on social media, the company notes. To remove content from EyeEm Market (where photographers sold their photos) or other content platforms, users would have to submit a request to support@eyeem.com and provide the content ID numbers of the photos they wanted to remove and whether they should be eliminated. deleted from your account as well, or just from the EyeEm marketplace.
Of note, the notice says that these removals from the EyeEm marketplace and associated platforms could take up to 180 days. Yes, that’s right: requested deletions take up to 180 days, but users only have 30 days to cancel their subscription. That means the only option is to manually delete photos one by one.
Worse still, the company adds that:
You hereby acknowledge and agree that your authorization for EyeEm to market and license your Content in accordance with Sections 8 and 10 shall remain valid until the Content is removed from EyeEm and all associated platforms within the time period indicated above. . All license agreements entered into prior to complete removal and usage rights granted accordingly will not be affected by the removal request or deletion.
Section 8 is where the license fees for training AI are detailed. In Section 10, EyeEm informs users that they will waive their right to any payment for their work if they delete their account, something users may consider doing to prevent their data from being sent to AI models. Understood!
EyeEm’s move is an example of how AI models are trained from users’ content, sometimes without their explicit consent. Although EyeEm offered a sort of opt-out procedure, any photographer who missed the announcement would have lost the right to dictate how their photos would be used in the future. Since EyeEm’s status as a popular alternative to Instagram had declined significantly over the years, many photographers may have forgotten that they had ever used it. It’s certainly possible that they would have ignored the email, if it wasn’t already in some spam folder.
Those who did notice the changes were upset that they only received a 30-day notice and did not options to bulk delete your contributionswhich makes it more painful to opt out.
Requests for comment sent to EyeEm were not immediately confirmed, but since this countdown had a 30-day deadline, we opted to publish them before receiving a response.
This type of dishonest behavior is why users today are considering moving to the open social web. The federated platform, Pixel poweredwhich runs on the same ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodonis taking advantage of EyeEm’s situation to attract users.
In a post on his official account, Pixelfed Announced “We will never use your images to help train AI models. “Privacy first, pixels forever.”