Incident 199: Ever AI Reportedly Deceived Customers about FRT Use in App

Description: Ever AI, now Paravision AI, allegedly failed to inform customers about the development and use of facial recognition that facilitates the sale of customers’ data to various businesses, a business model that critics said was an egregious violation of privacy.

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Alleged: Ever AI developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed Ever AI users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
199
Report Count
7
Incident Date
2019-04-01
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools.
nbcnews.com · 2019

“Make memories”: That’s the slogan on the website for the photo storage app Ever, accompanied by a cursive logo and an example album titled “Weekend with Grandpa.”

Everything about Ever’s branding is warm and fuzzy, about sharing your “best…

Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools.
nbcnews.com · 2019

The Ever AI website makes no mention of “best moments” snapshots. Instead, in news releases, it describes how the company possesses an “ever-expanding private global dataset of 13 billion photos and videos” from what the company said are te…

Ever, once accused of building facial recognition tech using customer data, shuts down consumer app
techcrunch.com · 2020

Cloud photo storage app Ever is shutting down, citing increased competition with the default services offered by Apple and Google as the cause. The company, however, had other issues beyond the plight of a small startup trying to compete wi…

California Company Settles FTC Allegations It Deceived Consumers about use of Facial Recognition in Photo Storage App
ftc.gov · 2021

A California-based developer of a photo app has settled Federal Trade Commission allegations that it deceived consumers about its use of facial recognition technology and its retention of the photos and videos of users who deactivated their…

Privacy pilfering project punished by FTC purge penalty: AI upstart told to delete data and algorithms
theregister.com · 2021

Face-recognition biz hammered after harvesting people's pics, videos without permission.

A California-based facial recognition biz has been directed by the US Federal Trade Commission to delete the AI models and algorithms that it developed…

Paravision AI ordered to delete face recognition software derived from user pictures without permission
dpreview.com · 2021

Face recognition developer Paravision AI has been ordered to delete masses of user data it held and used illegally to create face recognition applications from the images stored on its former cloud storage service Ever. The US Federal Trade…

Column: Millions of faces scanned without approval. We need rules for facial recognition
latimes.com · 2021

The powers that be at UCLA thought it was a good idea at the time — using state-of-the-art technology to scan students’ faces for gaining access to campus buildings. Students thought otherwise.

“The implementation of facial recognition tech…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.