I recently complained that I am shocked how casually Topaz are now trying to get people to upload personal and private photos to Topaz for their training purposes, with very little oversight or opt-in confirmation. As I previously said, people use this for personal photos (which could include a birth or bathtime with children for example) as well as for photos that they are not legally allowed to share without consent.
The fact that photos can now be uploaded to Topaz at the click of a slider is unacceptable, especially since Topaz have a habit of resetting a slider to their desired state after an update.
But to make things worse I have now, on loading Topaz been pressured by a popup “hey, you;ve been using this a few times, why don’t you turn the slider on to upload your photos”.
I cannot begin to express how angry I am. The photos I am editing are not only very personal, I’d be breaking the law if I shared some of them with you. How dare you act as if my private images are something you can so casually ask for to use for your business purposes. I’m F***ing furious.
Get your hands out of my machine and your nose out of my business. Remove the slider from underneath the editing sliders where it could be clicked by accident and don’t you dare pester me about it.
You have absolutely no respect for the serious implications this could have for some people and I now feel that I cannot trust this software with my photos.
This is something that should be treated with vastly more care and respect, and with much more thought for how it could go wrong.
To add a little more detail from my other post - some of the images I need to improve are from a training course for vulnerable adults. The images are for their own use and they have expressly opted out of allowing anyone else to see them. What happens if a bug causes one to be uploaded or I knock the slider by mistake?
Adding my support here. The popup is extremely annoying. I would prefer it if Topaz would respect my setting and stop asking me to change it! The language on the popup is also confusing, I humbly request that you only ask me one time and make the options 100% unambiguous.
I had the same question. Removing the slider/setting could either mean that images are NEVER uploaded to Topaz, or that they can ALWAYS be uploaded to Topaz and they just removed the option to prevent it.
If you have totally removed the photo uploading capability from the software then that is fantastic - I am very pleased and I will become a Topaz customer again. But, as per the replies above, you need to be very clear if that is what you have done, rather than just removed a visible user setting.
The casual inclusion of this feature showed total disrespect for your users privacy. Please confirm for us that all upload functionality has been disabled and it is no longer possible for users photos to be uploaded by the software.
If that is the case then that is very good news which I support, but you need to state this clearly in writing, please. Trust is easily lost and harder to earn back.
We no longer need are using images from users. We have disabled this option and no longer are requesting images to be shared with us for development purposes.
You may notice in your Preferences > General > Privacy menu the option to disable Anonymous Usage Tracking. This allows us to help improve Topaz Photo AI by sending in anonymous usage metrics and crash reports but not images.
If you ever want to share your work with us, you can reach out to us at the following link:
