> I suggest you use the word “published” instead of “public”, since that will make your category problem disappear. "publicly published" or "published and made

> I suggest you use the word “published” instead of “public”, since that will make your category problem disappear. "publicly published" or "published and made freely available on the internet" perhaps since all sorts of data gets published privately with access tightly controlled where as having something exposed to the entire global internet is about as public as anything ever can be. > If I surreptitiously take private photos of you, and then I publish them on the internet against your wishes, that does not suddenly make the photos any less private. I still couldn't say those were 'my private photos', the photos themselves would be very public (and they'd be yours), although you could say that the subject would be private I suppose... If you broke into my house and set up the cameras I could say you photographed by private moments. So, yeah I guess that'd be considered publicly published/exhibited photos of private moments. > I suspect you think logically, and you would like the words private and public to be disjoint sets, however in practice those words have overlapping meanings depending on semantics. It gets even more semantically complicated if you broke into my house, found my photo album, stole my private photos, and uploaded scans of them to the internet. At that point I'd probably want to say you "stole my private photos" which could be true, although it might be more accurate to say "You stole what were my private photos and made them public" That's the problem with the article. It makes it sound like the photos were private until they were added to the AI's training data. A sentence like: "...it bothers her that private medical images have been baked into a product without any form of consent or recourse to remove them." might then be better stated as "...it bothers her that publicly published images that originated from private medical files have been baked into a product without any form of consent or recourse to remove them." The distinction that the photos themselves were public matters since that explains how they ended up in the data set. I think everyone would agree that no one should use your private photos without your consent. Just gaining access to them would require something extraordinary making that easy to avoid. I think fewer people would suggest that a web scraper/crawler should have to somehow discover the full backstory of every publicly available photo it finds online to determine if a photo depicts something someone might consider private. It's admittedly a flawed assumption that a photo published to the internet where anyone can access and download it is fair game, but I'm not sure what would work better. Pretty much every search engine works under that same assumption.