Peek-A-Boo, Big Tech sees you: Expert warns that only 20 cloud images can make a video of their child’s deepfake

Parents love to capture the great moments of their children, from the first steps to birthday candles.

But a new study outside the United Kingdom shows that many of those treasured images can scan, analyze and become data for cloud storage services, and almost half of the parents do not even realize.

A survey of 2,019 parents of the United Kingdom, conducted by Global Perspectus and commissioned by the Swiss Privacy Technology Company, discovered that 48% of parents did not know suppliers such as Google Photos, Apple Icloud, Amazon Photos and Dropbox can access and analyze the photos they carry.

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These companies use artificial intelligence to classify images on albums, recognize faces and locations and suggest memories. While it is convenient, the same technology can also have more dangerous uses, such as Deepfake videos.

Professor Carsten Maple, cybersecurity expert at Warwick University, warns that, with only 20 photos, AI tools can create a convincing digital clone of a person, including Deepfake videos. These tools do not need high resolution scan or a video video, just a handful of everyday images in the cloud.

“Parents open without knowing their children to a possible exploitation by criminals who wish to use their data for their own ends,” Maple told The Edimburgh Evening News.

He added that even worldly photos, like a child at school or in the backyard, can reveal names and locations. Fifty -three percent of the parents surveyed had no idea that this was possible.

Protect your daughter from defects and abuses online

More than half of the parents, 56%, have automatic photos enabled, which means that their phones constantly send new images to the cloud without having to touch “load.”

What is artificial intelligence (AI)?

Even without deep defects, data collection is extensive. Only 43% of parents knew that cloud services collect metadata such as time, date and location, and only 36% surveyed knew that these companies also analyzed the content of the photos.

Concern is to catch up with convenience. Almost three out of four parents (72%) surveyed said that the privacy of the photo is important, and 69% recognized the risks of the fingerprints that remained when storing family photos online.

Although the study was conducted in the United Kingdom, its findings are applied worldwide. American families use the same technological platforms and face the same questions: Where do children’s photos go? Who is looking at them? And what could they become?