FTC Settlement With Ever Orders Data and AIs Deleted After Facial Recognition Pivot

The maker of a defunct cloud photo storage app that pivoted to selling facial recognition services has been ordered to delete user data and any algorithms trained on it, under the terms of an FTC settlement. TechCrunch reports: The regulator investigated complaints the Ever app — which gained earlier notoriety for using dark patterns to spam users’ contacts — had applied facial recognition to users’ photographs without properly informing them what it was doing with their selfies. Under the proposed settlement, Ever must delete photos and videos of users who deactivated their accounts and also delete all face embeddings (i.e. data related to facial features which can be used for facial recognition purposes) that it derived from photos of users who did not give express consent to such a use. Moreover, it must delete any facial recognition models or algorithms developed with users’ photos or videos.

This full suite of deletion requirements — not just data but anything derived from it and trained off of it — is causing great excitement in legal and tech policy circles, with experts suggesting it could have implications for other facial recognition software trained on data that wasn’t lawfully processed. Or, to put it another way, tech giants that surreptitiously harvest data to train AIs could find their algorithms in hot water with the US regulator.