Keep Your Privacy in Mind When Creating MyHeritage ‘Deepfakes’
You should always be a little skeptical about privacy when a new scent of the week meme comes out. This time it’s MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia Photo Animation Tool, which renders pretty realistic deepfake animations from images you upload to the service.
The premise is simple: It’s a fun way to get an idea of what a person could be like as a living, breathing person. So, if you have a super-old photo of your grandparents sitting somewhere, you can upload it to the site, let the deepfake tool do wonders, and feel that warm, blurry nostalgia that only comes from a static image of something ancient. … now I’m moving.
I mean, I don’t understand it myself, but I believe it brings some comfort and joy to some during these pandemic times, so I will not blame anyone for using MyHeritage. However, I wanted to take a moment to talk about digital privacy related to content that you all blindly dump on the site.
To get started, MyHeritage asks you to create an account to play with the Deep Nostalgia tool. That’s reasonable, but if you’re just planning to try out the multi-photo tool and never return to the site again, you probably don’t need to provide your actual email address, name, or year of birth. (I’ve always been a fan of the free 10 Minute Mail service for just this purpose.)
In addition, please be aware that anything you submit to MyHeritage, subject to its Terms and Conditions, gives the company a “free worldwide, perpetual and non-exclusive license to host, copy, host and distribute such content.” This probably won’t matter to most people, but know that it is possible, as it does for many sites on the Internet that you interact with.
Once you’ve uploaded a photo and made the MyHeritage tool animate it all, the original photo will exist in your My Photos archive. If you’re done with that, make sure you visit this part of the MyHeritage site and delete it – there is no point in keeping it, even if it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the animated version on the MyHeritage servers.
(I should also point out that clicking on a photo and selecting the Animation button in the editor allows you to select up to ten different fake animations – much more than what you get with your regular MyHeritage tool.)
After you’ve had some fun and created some animations – or run into any limitation MyHeritage has set for free, watermarked ones – don’t forget to delete your images and your account. For the latter, simply go to your account settings (using the icon in the upper right corner of the MyHeritage website). On the very first page, you will see a prompt to delete your account:
Click that blue link below the big red text to get started. In theory, this deletes any data you’ve uploaded to the MyHeritage servers and ensures that things like this don’t go unnoticed after you’re done experimenting with the service.
Is it really necessary to keep your privacy? To be honest, I really don’t see anyone besides you and your immediate family interested in your old photos. However, this is a habit you want to get used to on any sites you subscribe to, especially if you are the type of person who likes to reuse passwords on sites (don’t) or choose to send more personal data to MyHeritage than basic information that you must provide to create an account.
It is never a bad idea to reduce the size of your digital footprint, and this is especially true if or when you create accounts to try out some hot news on the Internet that you will invariably forget about after a few weeks (or months). ) from now on. While chances are good that your passing interest in deepfakes won’t come back to haunt you, the 20 other accounts you create each year for one or the other could pose a security , privacy, or phishing issue at some point. Even if they don’t – why store them if you’re never going to use them again?