One of the biggest viral sensations so far this year has been the face recognition site How-old.net. We had a blast with it in the office there last week, and everyone seems to be enjoying it, despite a somewhat, er, inconsistent results pattern.

But it seems that by uploading your picture to the site, you're giving Microsoft, who own the site, the rights to said picture and to even use that picture in future advertisements if they wished.

This is according to Buzzfeed News' @walldo, who pointed out the terms and conditions of Microsoft's Azure Cloud platform, which is what How-Old.net was built on.

 

 

"However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing, or submitting your Submission, you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies, and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses (including, without limitation, all Microsoft services), including, without limitation, the license rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate, and reformat your Submission; to publish your name in connection with your Submission; and to sublicense such rights to any supplier of the Website Services."

The home page of the site recently added 'P.S. We don't keep your photo', so something tells us they may have gotten some mails. They might wanna update the Terms and Conditions too. 

How-Old.net was built in a day as a demo, Microsoft didn't expect it to take off to the level that it has.

Now, no one is expecting their mush to end up in a Coca Cola ad or whatever, but the Ed Snowden in us (and sure look, there's a bit of him in ALL of us, right?), still had some alarm bells a-ringing.

Via Fast Company