Privacy
Researchers at Malwarebytes found a wave of polished AI Halloween video sites that turn your photo into a zombie or vampire — but they couldn’t work out who runs them. No company name, no address, just a Gmail or support email, and the sites say your uploaded pics get passed on to outside AI firms too. They found no malware, but with nobody named behind the site, there’s no way to know who’s keeping your photos or whether any ‘we’ll delete it’ promise is real.
The move
Before you upload a face, check for a named operator and real contact details — if you can’t tell who’s responsible for your photos, use something else. Ignore the countdown timers, and never upload a mate’s face without asking.
Practise it: Permission Panic →
For teachers
Talking about this in class
A quick way in: someone in Year 10 finds a seasonal AI filter doing the rounds in a group chat. It wants a clear, well-lit photo of them and their friends to make a zombie clip. What would they want to know before uploading? Steer the class towards one question: who actually runs this, and who ends up holding the photos?
The misconception worth tackling is “signing in with Google means Google checked it out.” It doesn’t — a real Google sign-in window says nothing about who built the site. A good answer spots that the tell isn’t how slick the page looks or which login it offers, but whether there’s a named operator and real contact details you could actually hold to account. Land the habit: a face is personal data, so find out who’s behind the site before you hand it over, and read what the privacy terms say about where photos go and whether they train AI on them.
For a starter that practises weighing up what you hand over, try Permission Panic, which has students judge what’s reasonable to allow. If a student says they’ve already uploaded their own or a friend’s photo, lead with reassurance — they’re not in trouble and it’s an easy thing to get drawn into — then suggest checking the site for a deletion or data-request option and following your school’s usual route to flag a worry.