Everalbum

» see everalbum.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

everalbum launched in 2013 out of san francisco, built inside the atomic labs venture studio by a team led by andrew dudum. the product was a photo backup app with unlimited free storage and aggressive contact-import viral loops built into the onboarding. by 2016 it was topping the productivity charts in more than 80 countries and pushing an android version. later it rebranded to just Ever and launched a photo-book side product to chase shutterfly's business.

the consumer product was fine. everpix had already died in 2013 showing that unlimited photo backup was hard to price, and google photos had swallowed most of the free-storage market by 2016. Ever kept its user base by leaning on the vertical iOS gallery and the memory-resurfacing features that predated the ones apple and google would ship a year later.

i did not use it. by the time Ever was chart-topping in 85 countries i was well inside the google photos and icloud photos loop, syncing an android phone in ankara to a gmail account i had opened in 2004 and treating the rest of the photo-cloud category as noise. Ever surfaced for me only later, through the FTC filing.

~ the case file ~

~ the pivot ~

somewhere around 2018 the company started training a face-recognition model on user-uploaded photos. the app had a face-tagging feature the users could see. what the users could not see was that Ever was combining those images with publicly scraped face datasets to train a general-purpose face-recognition system called Paravision, sold to enterprise and government customers.

the consent surface in the consumer app was decorative. the FTC later found that the face-recognition feature was automatically enabled for most users in most regions, could not really be turned off, and that photos of users who had deleted their accounts were still being used in training. everalbum represented on the app that it would ask consent. it did not, in practice, ask.

~ the FTC order ~

in august 2020 everalbum shut down the Ever consumer app. the company kept operating as Paravision, selling the face-recognition service that had been trained on the deleted photos. on 11 january 2021 the FTC announced a settlement. the order required paravision to obtain express consent before applying face recognition, delete the photos and videos of any user who had deactivated, and destroy any models or algorithms developed from the improperly collected data.

the deletion-of-trained-algorithms clause was the significant part. it was the first time the FTC had required a company to destroy an AI model as a remedy for the way the training data was obtained. the ruling got read as a template for future actions and cited immediately by every privacy-law analyst who had been waiting for exactly this remedy to appear in a settlement.

~ what remained ~

Paravision kept selling face recognition to enterprise and government buyers, minus the specific model the FTC had ordered destroyed. the Ever consumer brand was gone. the photos users had uploaded across seven years of the app were, per the settlement, supposed to be deleted, which is a promise nobody outside the compliance office can verify.

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