If you are active on popular social media networks, you probably have come across portraits shared by people that look animated but, at the same time, beautiful caricatures of themselves. These portraits are generated by a photo-generation app known as Lensa AI, which aims to optimise selfies of people to look even better.
However, using Lensa AI has given rise to many privacy concerns among users, as the application collects a lot of personal information about them.
As per the privacy policy of Lensa, the site collects and stores an individual's face data for online processing. However, it is also noted that the photos are automatically deleted within 24 hours after being generated by Lensa.
Although there happen to be a few security concerns about the entire procedure, Mari Galloway, a specialist in AI and cybersecurity, told American news media Today.com,
"They don't keep the photos and videos for longer than 24 hours."
But do we really know what they're doing with that? How are they deleting it? How is the data encrypted?
"We don't really know those details because they don't share that information with us."
It has been seen previously by experts in artificial intelligence that once something is somewhere on the internet, it is difficult to get rid of it.
It has been evident for popular social media tools like Facebook and Instagram that the data, which the users often delete, seems to resurface. Hence, the same concern can be expressed regarding Lensa AI.
Personal information like name, address, and email are typically requested from users at the onset of account creation. Experts like Galloway have expressed that it is important to safeguard an individual's personal data in this respect.
The AI can also be used for racial profiling; as more and more people enter their personal images on the site, the easier it becomes for the AI to create accurate images of these people, making it quite easy to identify them.
And the AI is often said to have been encoded for lighter-skinned people, with there being cases of three or four different people being inaccurately targeted because of it.
