13 million Barbie Selfies are circulating on the web. Companies drool over your data
The Selfie Barbie trend is hugely gaining momentum. There have already been over 13 million photos of Internet users converted into dolls – boast the creators of the barbieselfie.ai application. However, sharing a photo with friends can cost us dearly.
An intimidating number of people want to redo their photos in a candy Barbie style. The blockbuster movie with Margot Robbie in the lead role is still extremely popular, and taking advantage of the success of the production, the authors also released an application for creating Selfie Barbie. This one breaks popularity records, but there is no reason to be delighted here.
13 million Barbie Selfies with barbieselfie.ai – is it worth it?
The creators of the application on the barbieselfie.ai website boast of a huge milestone – Internet users have used the service to change photos more than 13 million times. This is a surprising result, because it is only a marketing campaign related to the premiere of the summer blockbuster.
The PhotoRoom company is responsible for creating a website that uses AI algorithms and its CEO, Matthieu Rouif, decided to boast of great interest. – It’s a great feeling when the biggest brands start using our technology. However, the big challenges associated with it are maintaining the right quality and protecting the integrity of the brands we work with – commented the head of the company.
The hit campaign was created as a collaboration between PhotoRoom, marketing agency Bond and the main client – Warner Bros., responsible for the release of the new Barbie movie.
Selfie Barbie is the jump of companies on your data
As we wrote in Wprost.pl, representatives of the Ministry of Digitization have already warned against the Selfie Barbie trend twice. It is not just a popular internet game, but a huge farm of private data. As Grzegorz Zajączkowski, who works in the ministry as a digitization leader, points out, a seemingly harmless trend is actually an operation of mass collection of information about Internet users.
Contracted by Warner Bros. Selfie Generator, barbieselfie.ai has a fairly long privacy policy that few users read. However, when we accept the terms of the service, we also agree to provide the company with:
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registration data;
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payment history;
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interacting with other services;
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GPS location history;
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data from other surveys and contests;
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access to the smartphone camera;
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access to data we share with others;
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social media or forum engagement data;
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the exact specifications of the smartphone.
There is also a second popular barbie selfie app on the bairbie.me domain. It does not meet the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), because as an American company, it does not have to adhere to the laws of the European Union. So it probably collects even more private data.