You should always get one little skeptical privacy when there is a new meme flavor to the week around. This time, it’s MyHeritageDeep nostalgia”Photographic animation tool, which makes quite realistic deepfake animations from the images you upload to the service.
The premise is simple: it’s a fun way to get one idea of what a person could have been like as a living, breathing human being. So if you have a super old photo of your grandparents sitting somewhere, you can post it on the site, leave the deepfake tool it works its magic, and you feel that warm, diffuse nostalgia that only comes from a static image of something ancient that is now moving.
I mean, I don’t get it myself, but I guess it brings comfort and joy to some during these times still in pandemic, so I won’t blame anyone for using MyHeritage. However, I wanted to take a moment to chat about digital privacy related to content that you just blindly throw at 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 plan to try the tool with a few photos and never go back to the site, you probably don’t need to cough up your actual email address, name, or year of birth. (I’m always a fan of the free 10 minute mail for this purpose only.)
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Please note, however, that everything you submit to the MyHeritage site, as set forth in the terms and conditions, provides the Company with a “worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, non-exclusive license to host, copy , publish and distribute this content ”. This probably won’t matter to most people, but know that it’s a possibility, as it is for many networking sites you interact with.
Once you’ve uploaded a photo and animated the MyHeritage tool, the original photo will exist on your “My photos“File. If you’re done, be sure to visit this portion of the MyHeritage site and delete it, it makes no sense to keep it, although it’s unclear what happens to the animated version on MyHeritage servers.
(I should also note that if you click on a photo and select the “Animate” button in the editor, you can choose up to ten different artificial animations, much more than you get from the usual MyHeritage tool.)
Once you’ve had fun and created some animations, or come across any limit that MyHeritage has free of charge, with watermark; don’t forget to delete the images i your account. For the latter, just visit your account settings (via the icon at the top right of the MyHeritage website). On the first page, you will see a request to delete the account:
Click on the blue link below the large red text to get started. Doing so, in theory, deletes all the data you’ve uploaded to MyHeritage’s servers and ensures that this kind of thing doesn’t get prolonged once you’ve finished playing with the service.
Is this truly necessary to maintain your privacy? Honestly, I can’t see anyone but you and your immediate family interested in your old photos. However, this is a habit you want to get used to anywhere you sign up, especially if you’re the type of person who likes to reuse passwords from multiple sites (no) or have decided to send more personal data. data in MyHeritage that the basic information you need to give up to create an account.
It’s never a bad idea to reduce the size of your fingerprint, and that’s especially true if, or when, you create accounts to try something new on the web that you’ll always forget about a few weeks (or months) from now on. Although the odds are good for your passing interest in deepfakes will not chase you again, the other 20 accounts you create each year for this, this or that could mean security, privacy or fishing issue at some point in the future. Even if they don’t–why keep them around if you never use them again?