Major leak exposes the disturbing misuse of women's yearbook pictures on an AI chatbot platform.
A troubling example of artificial intelligence exploitation has come to light following a major data exposure.
Secret Desires, an adult-oriented AI chatbot and image generation service, reportedly made millions of submitted photographs accessible to anyone online. The compromised databases contained nearly two million photos and videos, involving several images of ordinary people with a minimal digital footprint.
Using face-swapping features on AI roleplay apps, users are creating nonconsensual and highly graphic sexual imagery of people from high-profile celebrities to private citizens with no public profile.
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Secret Desires works as a web-based service similar to Character.ai or Meta's AI avatar tools, producing customised chatbots and visuals through user prompts.
As part of its premium membership priced between $7.99 and $19.99 a month, the platform offered a 'face swapping' that allowed subscribers to upload real individuals' photographs for insertion into sexually explicit AI-generated media.
According to the files examined by 404 Media, the publicly exposed materials may have been accessible for several months. The service reportedly maintained links to visual content in unprotected Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, allowing unrestricted access to XML documents containing image URLs and internal data.
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404 Media discovered a section labelled 'removed images' which held roughly 930,000 files, many depicting recognisable public figures and young women.
Another named 'live photos' was of 220,000 short AI videos, 404 Media revealed.
While some files were duplicates with altered names or showed identical subjects from varying perspectives or croppings, 404 Media identified nearly 1.8 million distinct files across the accessed storage areas.
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The photographs in the removed images and faceswap collections predominantly consist of real pictures of women, from social media personalities to original content on women's accounts, like bedroom selfies or profile pictures.
In Secret Desires' Discord community, where members share their platform experiences, users observed that from 3 November, face swapping remained advertised as a premium feature.
However, as of 11 November, face swapping seemingly no longer appears among the subscription offerings. Secret Desires continues to market itself as an adult chatting service for creating personalised AI companions, and offers a voice replication feature for audio chat modes.
The platform also said it uses end-to-end encryption to secure users' communications.
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“All your communications—including messages, voice calls, and image exchanges—are encrypted both at rest and in transit using industry-leading encryption standards," it read. "This ensures that only you have access to your conversations.”
It added: “Your data is securely stored on protected servers with stringent access controls. We employ advanced security protocols to safeguard your information against unauthorized access.”