Have you been faked?

But scraping them from the web says nothing about the source, even if you manage to remove all stock photos.

This way it is IMHO more likely that it is a "real" photo, most probably uploaded by a "real" user and the site has also the IP of the sender.

Morover, most photos you can find on the web have had their EXIF information removed by the host, maybe it is not the case for a casual user.

As I see it scraping them off the web is good for quantity but not so much for quality, this (completely hypothetical) approach would give less quantity but IMHO better quality data.

Then you will need some AI (or whatever) to remove non-human photos or non-suitable photos (position, lighting, etc.) whilst this method would almost guarantee only "portraits" or "upper torso" pictures of humans.

What I tried to say wasn't that this is the "only" method, but that it is one of the "easy" ones with a high probability of getting "reliable" data.

3 letter agencies will kindly ask/force Facebook to share their face-detection data and algorithms, no need to do this themselves.

In fact I think the biggest co-conspirator of NSA and other agencies is Apple. First they put fingerprint sensor inside Home button, so you can't avoid using it, and have to share your fingerprints whether you like it or not. Now that they captured enough fingerprints they move to FaceID, which sensors are so conveniently placed that you cant avoid having your face scanned, even if you don't ever set up FaceID for your own use.

This should be mentioned on the website.

> if you want to be deleted please drop me a letter wastemaster@gmail.com

There should be an easier mechanism to request a deletion of our photo. Better still, request permission from the user to store the photo in your servers before actually storing them.

I think this is the bare minimum of transparency that should required before letting people upload personal data, especially in this day and age.

And - with all due respect - an alternative would be providing an open-source program to create offline this "128-dimentional vector" and upload only this latter and NOT the photo.

Not to take a jab at you specifically, but the fact that someone that can make websites like these is ignorant enough about privacy (law) to casually drop this line marks a worrying development in the accessibility of AI tech.

For impactful technologies, we probably want the required domain knowledge to come with some structural social disciplining so that we can collectively steer that impact in the right direction (whatever that is). Clearly AI libraries have become so easy to use professional ethics are not part of the curriculum.