But in September, she discovered her efforts hadn’t been entirely successful. Kodye Elyse used PimEyes, a startling search engine that finds photos of a person on the internet within seconds using facial recognition technology. When she uploaded a photo of her 7-year-old son, the results included an image of him she had never seen before. She needed a $29.99 subscription to see where the image had come from.
Her ex-husband had taken their son to a soccer game, and they were in the background of a photograph on a sports news site, sitting in the front row behind the goal. She realized she wouldn’t be able to get the news organization to take down the photo, but she submitted a removal request, via an online form, to PimEyes, so that her son’s image would not show up if other people searched for his face.
She also found a toddler-aged photo of her now 9-year-old daughter being used to promote a summer camp she had attended. She asked the camp to take down the photo, which it did.
“I think everybody should be checking that,” Kodye Elyse said. “It’s a good way to know that no one is repurposing your kids’ images.”
…Arielle Geismar, 22, a college student and digital safety advocate in Washington, D.C., described it as a “privilege to grow up without a digital identity being made for you.”
“Kids are currently technology’s guinea pigs,” Ms. Geismar said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of them.”
Read more:
Hill, K. (2023, October 24). Can You Hide a Child’s Face From A.I.? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/technology/artifical-intelligence-children-privacy-internet.html