Critics have constantly questioned the AI companies for their shady AI training practices. Now, a new report reveals a major privacy blunder involving a dating app. The regulators recently closed an investigation that revealed that the dating app shared around 3 million images with a third-party company for AI training without user consent.
3 million dating app photos shared for AI training without user consent
The issue dates back to 2014, when a third-party company asked the dating app OkCupid for access to its large dataset to improve its AI training systems. Upon request, the company executives reportedly agreed to share millions of user photos, along with their demographic and location details. The officials did not place any limit on how the data could be used.
What’s even more concerning is that the users were not notified of the decision. They were not even given an option to opt out of photo sharing. Basically, their images and demographic details were shared with a third party without any consent or notification. Ironically, the move goes against the dating apps‘ own privacy policy that user data would not be shared with outside parties. Some may argue that the decision is minor. However, using anyone’s image or any information without consent goes against the established law. Further, this is only one known case. There may be hundreds of such cases that are yet to be discovered.
Users were not even notified or given an option to opt out
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation in 2019 to review whether users were really misled. The whole investigation took quite a long time. But thankfully, the regulator has closed the matter and has ordered that all shared photos and any AI training models created from them must be deleted.
Further, FTC has also banned the parent company of the dating app from misrepresenting how it handles user data for the next 20 years. No financial penalties were levied because of limits in the law.
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