Software engineer Vishnu Mohandas decided he would quit Google in more ways than one when he learned that the tech giant had briefly helped the US military develop AI to study drone footage. In 2020 he left his job working on Google Assistant and also stopped backing up all of his images to Google Photos. He feared that his content could be used to train AI systems, even if they weren’t specifically ones tied to the Pentagon project. “I don’t control any of the future outcomes that this will enable,” Mohandas thought. “So now, shouldn’t I be more responsible?”
The site (TheySeeYourPhotos) returns what Google Vision is able to decern from photos. You can test with any image you want or there are some sample images available.
And without the context that the Ars article provides, that information means very little to the casual visitor. There is absolutely nothing on that website to provide any of that context. It certainly doesn’t say that by uploading your photo, you are agreeing to allow Google an irrevocable licence to use it to train AI.
The only thing there is an image that says “Take control” which just links to the author’s cloud storage company. This whole thing is thinly-veiled viral marketing.