By uploading your selfie to that fun new AI avatar app, are you unknowingly giving away your face? This isn’t sci-fi – it’s a real privacy concern. Business owners across Liverpool, the North West, and North Wales are joining millions of users in the latest AI photo trends. It might seem like harmless entertainment, but when you upload your face to a generative AI tool, you’re handing over more than just pixels – you’re potentially handing over rights to your own likeness.
The Allure and the Hidden Cost of AI Selfie Apps
AI-powered avatar apps (think FaceApp or the recent Lensa AI craze) offer to transform your portrait into stylized cartoons, “professional” headshots, or even fantasy artwork. The immediate payoff is cool profile pictures and social media buzz. The hidden cost? What happens to those photos of your face once they’re on someone else’s servers. According to cybersecurity experts, it’s almost “impossible” to know what happens to a user’s photos after they’re uploaded to such an app abc7.com. In other words, once your image leaves your device, you lose control.
What Really Happens to Your Uploaded Face?
Many app developers claim they respect your privacy – for instance, Lensa’s creators say they delete uploaded images after 24 hours and use them “solely for the purpose” of making your avatars abc7.com abc7.com. They even assert compliance with GDPR and other regulations, storing only the “bare minimum of data” needed abc7.com. But here’s the rub: you have to take their word for it. Without a full audit of a company’s backend systems, you can’t be sure if your selfies are truly wiped or if copies linger in backups and databases abc7.com.
Bottom line: that friendly AI app might be doing exactly what it promises – or it might be training its algorithms on your face or sharing data with third parties. You simply don’t know.
Beyond how your images are stored, consider where they go. Many of these AI services run in the cloud, often on servers outside the UK. Lensa, for example, processes data on servers in the U.S. abc7.com. For a business owner in the UK, that means your personal data (your facial images) is being transferred internationally, invoking legal considerations we’ll explore later in this series. The immediate concern is that once your photo is in another country’s jurisdiction, your protections might depend on a foreign company’s policies and promises.
Do You Still “Own” Your Face Online?
You snap the photo, so you own the copyright – right? Technically, yes. However, by using these apps you often grant them a broad license to do almost anything with your content. Let’s take FaceApp’s infamous terms as an example. FaceApp’s policy went viral for good reason: “You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish… and display your User Content… in all media formats… without compensation to you.”appleinsider.com. In plain English, **you still own your photo, but the company can use it however it wants, forever, and you can’t revoke that permission appleinsider.com. They can even monetize your face or use it in ads without ever telling you appleinsider.com.
For business leaders, this should set off alarm bells. Your face is part of your personal brand. If you’re uploading professional headshots or images with your company logo in them, consider that those images (and anything in them) could be repurposed by the app provider. Ever wonder why these fun apps are “free” or very cheap? Because your data is the real price. By chasing a trendy avatar, you might be handing a tech company a valuable asset: biometric data about you and implicit permission to exploit it.
Why Privacy Matters for Business Owners
You might think: “My face is already on LinkedIn and my company website, so what’s the harm?” The difference with AI tools is the scope of usage and loss of control. When you post a photo on your own site or social media, you retain some control and context. When you upload it to a third-party AI service, it enters a machine’s training pipeline or a company’s content library. They can combine it with millions of other faces, analyze it, learn from it, and even create new images derived from it. If that company (or its data) gets acquired, breached, or integrated into some larger AI, your face might travel with it.
For a business owner, privacy isn’t just a personal issue – it’s a professional one. Trust and reputation are currency in Liverpool’s business community and beyond. If customers or employees discover you’ve unwittingly allowed a third party to stockpile images of people associated with your business, they may lose confidence in your data stewardship. It cuts both ways too: if you encourage staff to try cool new AI tools for work profile pics, you could be opening them and your company up to privacy risks. One viral trend isn’t worth a breach of trust.
Remember: In the digital age, your face is a form of identity and authentication. Protect it like you would your passwords. In the next part of this series, we’ll dive into the business risks of misusing these images – from deepfake scams to brand impersonation. But before that, take a moment to reflect on how and where your own images are shared.
At Hilt Digital Solutions, we take privacy seriously. We’re an “educate first” kind of partner – here to help North West businesses enjoy the benefits of AI and cloud tech without giving away the crown jewels (or your face). Feel free to reach out to our team to learn how to leverage AI securely – we’ve got the no-nonsense expertise in cyber and cloud assurance to keep your data safe and your mind at ease.