EyeEm, a Berlin-based photo-sharing community sold to Spanish company Freepik after bankruptcy last year, now licenses users' photos to train AI models. The company notified users via email earlier this month that it was adding a new clause to its terms of service that “gives you the right to upload your content to train, develop, and improve our software, algorithms, and machine learning models.” ” The user was given his 30 days to opt out by removing all content from EyeEm's platform. Otherwise they were agreeing to this use case for their work.
At the time of acquisition in 2023, EyeEm's photo library included 160 million images and nearly 150,000 users. The company said it will integrate its community with Freepik's over time.
Once considered a potential challenger to Instagram, or at least the “European Instagram,” EyeEm was reduced to a staff of three before selling to Freepik, TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden previously reported Reported. Freepik CEO Joaquín Cuenca Abela hinted at the company's possible plans for EyeEm, saying it would look at ways to incorporate more AI for creators on the platform.
After all, that meant selling their work to train AI models.
EyeEm's updated Terms of Use now look like this:
8.1 Grant of Rights – EyeEm Community
By uploading content to the EyeEm Community, you grant us a non-exclusive license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, transform, adapt, create derivative works from, communicate to the public, and/or promote your content. You hereby grant us a worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to do so. content.
This includes, among other things, sublicensable and transferable rights to use the content for training, developing and improving software, algorithms and machine learning models. If you do not agree to this, please do not add your content to the EyeEm Community.
The rights granted in this Section 8.1 with respect to Your Content will remain in effect until it is completely removed from the EyeEm Community and Partner Platforms in accordance with Section 13. You can request removal of your content at any time. See Section 13 for this term.
Section 13 details the complex removal process, which starts by directly deleting the photos. The company says this does not affect content previously shared to EyeEm Magazine or social media. To remove content from the EyeEm Market (where photographers have sold their photos) or other content platforms, users can submit a request to support@eyeem.com and include the content ID number of the photo they want removed and the You must provide whether the They will also be removed from your account or only from the EyeEm Market.
Notably, the notice states that their removal from EyeEm Market and partner platforms may take up to 180 days. Yes, that's right. Removal requests can take up to 180 days, but users only have 30 days to opt out. This means that he has no choice but to manually delete the photos one by one.
To make matters worse, the company adds:
You acknowledge that EyeEm's permission to market and license your Content pursuant to Sections 8 and 10 remains in effect until the Content is removed from EyeEm and all Partner Platforms within the period set forth above. I hereby acknowledge and agree to this. All license agreements entered into and usage rights granted thereby prior to permanent deletion will not be affected by the deletion request or removal.
Section 8 details licensing rights for training AI. In Section 10, EyeEm informs you that if you delete your account, you waive your right to payment for your work. A user might think of doing this to avoid having their data fed into her AI model. Gotcha!
EyeEm's move is an example of how AI models can be trained based on user content, sometimes without the user's explicit consent. Although EyeEm provided some sort of opt-out procedure, photographers who missed this announcement would have lost the right to decide how their photos were used in the future. Considering EyeEm's status as a popular Instagram alternative has declined significantly in recent years, many photographers may have forgotten they ever used it in the first place. Sure, you may have ignored the email unless it ended up in your spam folder.
Those who noticed the change were upset that they were only given 30 days' notice and no notice at all. Option to delete posts in bulkmaking it even more painful to opt out.
Has anyone figured out how to bulk delete photos? #IM. I received this email yesterday. He only has 60 photos, but he doesn't want to feed the beast of training data for free… pic.twitter.com/lUuDR5BnGb
— Powen Shiah @polexa@tech.lgbt (@polexa) April 5, 2024
suggest an existing one @EmEm Users run away immediately. They have secretly built in this destructive rights acquisition as an opt-out. “These rights now include sublicensable and transferable rights to use the content to train, develop, and improve software, algorithms, and machine learning models.”
— Joel Goodman (@pixel8foto) April 3, 2024
EyeEm's request for comment was not immediately acknowledged, but since the countdown had a 30-day deadline, we decided to publish it before we received a response.
This kind of dishonesty is why today's users are considering moving to the open social web. Pixelfed, a federated platform that runs on the same ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon, is using the EyeEm situation to attract users.
In a post on its official account, Pixelfed said, “We will never use your images to train our AI models. Privacy first, pixels forever.”