Why we'll never use your photos to train AI
We promise your photos never end up in an AI model. Below we explain what that promise means and how we put it on record, both in our technology and in our privacy policy.
Illustrative image · your photos are stored on servers in Europe
The photos of your kids, your holidays and your family are meant to be kept and looked back on, not to serve as raw material for an AI model. Yet at many photo services that is exactly what happens: the terms state that the service may use your content to 'improve' products, and in practice training models tends to fall under that word 'improve'. At Ohhi the agreement is simple: your photos never end up in an AI model.
What 'no training' means for us
Our starting point is that your photos are yours and stay that way. We ask for no licence to reuse them, we do not analyse them for ads, and we do not use them to train AI. That applies to us and to the parties we work with.
That choice comes at a price. We do not train a face recognition model ourselves: we run an existing model, pre-trained by third parties, unchanged. At Ohhi you turn recognition on yourself if you want it, and the computing happens on our own servers in Europe.
A promise about your data is only worth something if you can verify it. That is why we put it on record not only in words, but also in the technology.
How we put it on record
We do not leave it at that promise. We make it concrete in three places:
- In our privacy policy. It states in black and white that we do not use your photos to train AI, and nowhere do we ask for a licence to reuse them.
- In the technology. Analysis, such as automatic tags and (if you turn it on) face recognition, runs on our own servers in Europe, with existing models that we do not train further. Nothing goes to an external AI service.
- In what we publish. We describe in plain language what we do and do not do with your data, and we update it as soon as something changes.
Ohhi deliberately feels calm as a result. There is no clever feed that gets to know you. Above your overview you do see 'Today in other years': it picks purely by date, without a notification and without an algorithm. That is a deliberate choice, and the same reason we think calm works better than an algorithm. Where your photos do live, you can read in servers in Europe: what it really means. If you're coming from Google Photos, the page on the European alternative to Google Photos explains how our approach differs. If you want to see it for yourself, you can start for free via the plans.
