Artificial intelligence: the danger of posting a photo of your child – 10/15/2023 – Tech

There are two distinct types of parental behavior on TikTok: those who crack eggs over their kids’ heads for laughs and those who are desperately trying to make sure the internet doesn’t know who their kids are.

For the TikTok star who posts under the name Kodye Elyse, an uncomfortable online experience caused her to stop including her three children on her social media. A video she posted in 2020 of her young daughter dancing attracted millions of views and creepy comments from strange men. (She requested that The New York Times not publish her full name because she and her children have been targeted by people who revealed their identities online in the past.)

“It’s like ‘The Truman Show’ on the internet,” said Elyse, 35, who has 4 million followers on TikTok and posts about her work as a tattoo artist and her experiences as a single mother. “You never know who’s watching.”

After this experience, she deleted images of her children from the internet. She tracked down all of her online accounts, on sites like Facebook and Pinterest, and deleted them or made them private. She has since joined the noisy group of TikTokers who encourage parents not to post about their children publicly.

But last month, she discovered her efforts were not entirely successful. Kodye Elyse used PimEyes, a search engine that finds photos of a person on the internet in seconds using facial recognition technology. When she submitted a photo of her 7-year-old son, the results included an image of him she had never seen. She needed a $29.99 subscription to see where the image came from.

Her ex-husband had taken their son to a football game, and they were in the background of a photograph on a news website, sitting in the first row of seats behind the goal. She realized she wouldn’t be able to get the news site to delete the photo, but she filed a deletion request with PimEyes to remove her son’s image so it wouldn’t appear if others searched for her face.

She also found a photo of her daughter as a child, now 9 years old, being used to promote a summer camp she had attended. She asked the camp to remove the photo, which they did.

“I think everyone should check this out,” she said. “It’s a good way to know that no one is reusing your children’s images.”

Beware of “sharenting”

The extent to which parents should post about their children online has been discussed and scrutinized to such an intense degree that it has its own term: “sharenting.”

Historically, the main criticism of parents who overshare online has been the invasion of their children’s privacy, but advances in artificial intelligence-based technologies present new ways for bad actors to misappropriate children’s online content.

Among the new risks are scams using “deepfake” technology, which imitate children’s voices, and the possibility of a stranger discovering the name and address of a minor just by searching for her photo.

Amanda Lenhart, head of research at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that offers media advice to parents, highlighted a recent public service campaign by Deutsche Telekom (German telecommunications operator) that advocated more thoughtful sharing of parenting data. children.

The video featured an actress playing a 9-year-old girl named Ella, whose fictional parents were indiscreet in posting photos and videos of her online. Deepfake technology generated a digitally aged version of Ella that was used to blackmail her fictional parents by telling them her identity was stolen, her voice was duplicated to fool them into thinking she was kidnapped, and a nude photo from her childhood was sold .

Lenhart called the video “exaggerated” but stated that it showed that “in fact, this technology is actually very good” for any purpose. People are already receiving calls from scammers imitating loved ones in distress using versions of their voices created with AI tools.

Jennifer DeStefano, a mother living in Arizona, received a call this year from someone who claimed to have kidnapped her 15-year-old daughter. “I answered the phone ‘Hello’; on the other end was our daughter Briana sobbing and crying saying: ‘Mom'”, reported the mother in testimony in Congress at the end of last semester.

DeStefano was negotiating to pay the kidnappers $50,000 when he discovered his daughter was home “resting safely in bed.”

What a face reveals

Obscure photos and videos online can be linked to someone’s face with facial recognition technology, which has become more powerful and accurate in recent years. Photos taken at a school, daycare, birthday party, or playground may appear in a search. (A school or daycare center must present a consent form and leave the guardian free to refuse)

“When a child is younger, parents have more control over their image,” said Debbie Reynolds, a data privacy and emerging technologies consultant. “But children grow up. They have friends. They go to parties. Schools take photos,” she highlighted.

Reynolds recommends that parents search online for their children’s faces using a service like PimEyes or FaceCheck.ID. If they don’t like what they find, they should try to get the sites the photo was posted on to remove it, she said. (Some will, but others—like news sites—may not.)

In a 2020 Pew Research survey, more than 80% of parents reported sharing photos, videos and information about their children on social networking sites. Experts were unable to say how many parents were sharing these images only on private accounts rather than publicly, but they said private sharing was an increasingly common practice.

While a public facial search engine is a potentially useful tool for a parent, it can also be used for nefarious purposes.

“A tool like PimEyes can be — and probably is — used just as easily by a stalker as by a concerned parent,” said privacy researcher Bill Fitzgerald, who has also expressed concern about overbearing parents who use it to monitor their children’s activities. teenage children.

PimEyes owner Giorgi Gobronidze said more than 200 accounts had been disabled on the site for inappropriate searches of children’s faces.

A similar facial recognition engine, Clearview AI, whose use is limited to law enforcement, has been used to identify victims in child sexual abuse photos. Gobronidze explained that PimEyes was also the resource adopted by human rights organizations to help children.

But he’s worried enough about would-be users who are child predators that he claims PimEyes is working on a feature to block searches for faces that appear to belong to minors.

For his part, consultant Bill Fitzgerald is concerned that parents who use the tool to search for their own children may be inadvertently helping PimEyes’ algorithm improve its recognition of those minors.

Cultural anthropologist and director of the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Mimi Ito said facial recognition technology has made sharing photos of children, which are normally happy, online more challenging.

“There’s a growing awareness that with AI, we don’t really have control over all the data we’re spreading across the social media ecosystem,” he said.

Zuckerberg and Snowden hide their children’s faces

Lucy and Mike Fitzgerald, professional ballroom dancers in Saint Louis, USA, maintain an active presence on social media to promote their business and refrain from posting images online of their daughters, ages 3 and 5, and have asked friends and family members who respect the decision. They believe that children should have the right to create and control for themselves. They also worry that their images might be used inappropriately.

“The fact that you can steal someone’s photo in a few clicks and then use it for whatever you want is worrying,” said Lucy. “I understand the appeal of posting photos of your kids, but at the end of the day, we don’t want them to be the ones who have to deal with potential unintended consequences.”

She and her husband are not experts who have been “informed about what’s coming on the technology horizon,” but explained that they “had a feeling” years ago. “(We thought) there would be capabilities that we can’t predict now that will eventually be problematic for our children.”

Parents who are more likely to know details about what’s coming on the technology horizon, like Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor turned whistleblower, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, hide their faces from your children in public social media posts.

In holiday-themed Instagram posts, Zuckerberg used the clumsy emoji method — posting a digital sticker on his older children’s heads — while Snowden and his wife, Lindsay Mills, artfully posed one of their two children behind a balloon to obscure his face.

“I want my children to have the choice to come out to the world in whatever way they choose, when they are ready,” Mills said.

A spokesperson for Zuckerberg declined to comment or explain why his baby’s face didn’t get the same treatment and went because facial recognition technology doesn’t work very well on babies.

Privacy and success in the future

Many experts noted that teens thought a lot about resolving their digital identities and that some used pseudonyms online to avoid parents, teachers and potential employers from finding their accounts. But if there is a public image on that account that shows their face, it can still be linked to them through a facial search engine.

“It’s very difficult to keep your face off the web,” said Priya Kumar, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the privacy implications of sharing personal information online.

Kumar suggests that parents involve children, around the age of 4, in the posting process and talk to them about which images are appropriate to share.

Amy Webb, CEO of the technology-focused consultancy Future Today Institute, promised in a Slate post a decade ago not to post personal photos or identifying information of her young daughter online. Some readers took this as a challenge and found a family photo that Webb inadvertently made public, illustrating how difficult it can be to keep a child off the internet.

Her daughter, now a teenager, said she enjoyed being an “online ghost” and thought it would help her professionally.

“Future employers are going to find absolutely nothing about me because I have no platform,” she said. “This will help me be successful in the future.”

Other young people who grew up in the age of online sharing also said they were grateful to have parents who didn’t post photos of them publicly online.

Shreya Nallamothu, 16, is a student whose research into child influencers helped enact a new state law in Illinois that requires parents to set aside earnings for their children if they are featuring them in monetized online content.

She said she was “so grateful” that her parents didn’t post “super embarrassing moments of me on social media.” “There are people in my class who are really good at finding their classmates’ parents’ Facebook and scrolling through it,” she explained. They use any embarrassing material for birthday posts that disappear on Snapchat.

Arielle Geismar, 22, a college student and digital security advocate in Washington, described it as a “privilege to grow up without having a digital identity created for you.”

“Children are currently guinea pigs for technology,” Geismar said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of them.”