How did the Papas and hundreds of thousands of other people end up in the database? It’s a roundabout story. I think artificial intelligence is cool and I want it to be smarter, but generally you ask people to participate in research. “I wish they would have asked me first if I wanted to be part of it. Papa, who is now 19 and attending college in Oregon.

Containing the likenesses of nearly 700,000 individuals, it has been downloaded by dozens of companies to train a new generation of face-identification algorithms, used to track protesters, surveil terrorists, spot problem gamblers and spy on the public at large. None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace.

Their mother, Dominique Allman Papa, uploaded them to Flickr after joining the photo-sharing site in 2005. The pictures of Chloe and Jasper Papa as kids are typically goofy fare: grinning with their parents sticking their tongues out costumed for Halloween. Now some of those faces may have the ability to sue. The hard math says that one of those services that offers an effortless way to archive everything is a better home for your pictures.How Photos of Your Kids Are Powering Surveillance Technology Millions of Flickr images were sucked into a database called MegaFace. Never once do you have to remember to sync your photos. However, there are several online photo storage services that are not only free, but also allow you to upload all of your photos-every picture you take, on every device-automatically. And you can still upload photos manually through the browser, which is a mind-numbing and tedious drag-and-drop process that costs nothing. With this change, you have to pay either $6 a month or $50 a year to use it. But Auto-Uploadr is no longer free software. Sounds great! And what a convenience for fans of the photo storage site. The Auto-Uploadr is a desktop app Flickr launched last year that takes every photo on your computer, your external hard drives, your SD cards from your camera, or in Dropbox or iCloud, and uploads them into one central, searchable library.

Not anymore, because Yahoo just made its Auto-Uploadr tool a premium feature. Flickr used to be a great home for all your photos a place to save, collect, and share all your images easily and for free.

Flickr gallery