Facial recognition website steals images of the dead -.

While the Internet has given us many positive things, it has also given us many new fears, such as finding an image of yourself on a website without permission. This happened to Scarlett, a resident of Kirkland, Washington, who found herself on the facial recognition search engine PimEyes.

After having the photos removed from the platform, Scarlett discovered images of her family there as well. As a user of Ancestry.com, she discovered that images of her family members were being removed from Ancestry and put on PimEyes.

These images included both living and dead relatives and caused Scarlett great concern because she believes the photos of the dead could be used to find out more information about the living. Pretty creepy stuff, actually.

A spokesman for Ancestry told Wired that the website “prohibits the scrapping of data, including photographs, from Ancestry’s sites and services, as well as the resale, reproduction or publication of content or information found on Ancestry.”

Director of PimEyes said: “PimEyes only crawls websites that officially allow us to do so. It was … very unpleasant news that our crawlers have somehow violated the rule.” The search engine will now block Ancestry’s domain and indexes related to it.