You've heard of the Internet of Shit, but this is literally the case: an AI-powered poop analysis app's database of user-submitted poop images leaking into the wild. If you use PoopCheck and don't know what you signed up for, it's time for a reality check.
The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He'd been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them: "I've got 150k+ labeled and classified images of 💩 from roughly 25K different people. Jokes aside, I know there's a lot of value in it (hard to obtain, useful for ML [machine learning] training, cancer studies etc) but not sure on how to move about it. Feels like I'm sitting on a pile of shi..ny coins but can't find who wants them." The poster added that "the images are extremely rare," and that he was trying to figure out how much money he could sell them for.
The privacy policy does not permit the app's developer to collect the data it is given, but 404 Media's Jason Koebler encountered a clickwrap agreement upon account creation that requires the user to give it all up.
you grant Soft All Things LLC a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, unconditional, royalty-free, fully-paid, transferable, sub licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, distribute, sell, license, and create derivative works from such content for any lawful purpose, including but not limited to research, commercial exploitation, product development, and third party licensing. You acknowledge that your images and data may be used to create, train, improve, and commercialize AI technologies and machine learning models, and that such models and any outputs derived from your data may be licensed or sold to third parties, including medical organizations, research institutions, and commercial partners.
Koebler contacted the company and verified that it was all for sale, and was given… sample images: "Around 5,000 of these have also been manually reviewed by a member of our team."
The latest and most magnificent example of "if it's free, you are the product," a maxim apparently dating to the 1973 short film embedded below.
