The face recognition search engine, PimEyes, seems to have scraped Ancestry.com for images to populate its database without permission and apparently by mistake. Although the scraped images don't relate to living individuals, privacy and data protection concerns have still been raised because PimEyes' algorithms can use those images to identify living people through their ancestral connections. A spokesperson for Ancestry.com confirmed that its terms and conditions prohibit data scraping. In response, Giorgi Gobronidze, a director at PimEyes, said that his site "only crawls websites who officially allow us to do so. It was … very unpleasant news that our crawlers have somehow broken the rule.”
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