Photo sharing site 'EyeEm' announces that 'posted photos will be used for AI training'

EyeEm, a photo sharing site with nearly 150,000 users and about 160 million photos, has revised its terms of use to include a statement that 'photos uploaded to the EyeEm community will be used for training AI.' If the photos are not deleted within 30 days, they will be licensed for any use under the terms of use.

Photo-sharing community EyeEm will license users' photos to train AI if they don't delete them | TechCrunch

In 2014, we partnered with the stock photo service Getty Images to provide photos and sell them on the marketplace.

EyeEm had raised a total of $24 million (approximately 3.794 billion yen) from venture capital and other sources, but in April 2021, it was acquired by Talenthouse, a Swiss-based social media operator, for $40 million (approximately 6.323 billion yen).

However, in early 2023, Talenthouse sold EyeEm to EQT, which operates the Spain-based stock photo service Freepik, in order to streamline its business. The sale price has not been disclosed. In recent years, the EyeEm business has been run by a minimal team of just three employees, including long-time EyeEm employee and most recent CTO Peter Willert.

According to Article 8, Section 1, 'Grant of Rights,' of EyeEm's new Terms of Use, by uploading content to EyeEm, you 'grant to EQT a non-exclusive, worldwide, transferable, sublicensable right to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, modify, adapt, create derivative works from, communicate to the public, and/or promote such content.'

In particular, it explicitly states that 'this includes the transferable, sublicensable right to use the content for training, developing and improving software, algorithms and machine learning models.'

The rights granted in Article 8, Paragraph 1 shall remain valid until completely removed from the EyeEm Community and Partner Platforms in accordance with Article 13.

The removal procedure in Article 13 shows how to remove content registered in EyeEm Market or partner platforms. According to the procedure, you need to send the ID of the content you want to remove to '[email protected]' and then choose whether to remove it from your account or only from the market, and submit a request. The removal process can take up to 180 days.

However, there is also a separate statement that 'All license agreements concluded prior to complete deletion, and any associated usage rights, will not be affected by a deletion request or deletion,' and Article 10 states that 'If you delete your account, you waive your right to receive compensation for your work.'

For this reason, news site TechCrunch points out that users who don't want their content uploaded to EyeEm to be used to train AI have no choice but to manually delete all content within a month.

According to TechCrunch, because there is only a short time left for users to take action, the company decided to go public with the information even though it had not yet received a comment from EyeEm.