Imagine taking a picture of a stranger while you’re out and about in a bustling city, then submitting it to a search engine so you can almost instantly find out who they are.This is not speculative. Thanks to a website called PimEyes, which is regarded as one of the most potent publicly accessible facial recognition systems online, it is now feasible.
PimEyes has gained a reputation on TikTok as a powerful tool for internet sleuths attempting to identify strangers. Videos demonstrating how PimEyes and other search engines can be used to identify random cameramen at Taylor Swift concerts, for instance, have received millions of views. Content containing personal information that can encourage identity theft, stalking, or other crimes is prohibited under TikTok’s community guidelines. But on Wednesday morning, this specific video remained online.
It’s an AI tool that’s like a reverse image search on steroids, originally founded in 2017 by two computer programmers in Poland. It scans a face in a photo and crawls dark corners of the internet to surface photos many people didn’t even know existed of themselves attending concerts or dining in restaurants.Although the company says it is a service that helps people keep an eye on their online presence, it has caused controversy since it has been used by stalkers as a surveillance tool, gathering a large number of photographs of youngsters, and adding images of deceased persons to its database without consent.
In the upcoming years, PimEyes-copying services are anticipated to become more and more commonplace since there are now no federal rules in the United States limiting face recognition technology.Journalist Kashmir Hill advises people to think about the repercussions of selecting to use this technology in public spaces constantly.
According to Hill, a reporter for The New York Times who recently released a book on facial recognition technology called “Your Face Belongs to Us,” “Something happens on the train, you bump into someone, or you’re wearing something embarrassing, somebody could just take your photo, and find out who you are and maybe tweet about you, or call you out by name, or write nasty things about you online.”
PimEyes CEO: Service has many ‘legitimate purposes’
Anyone can use the free basic version of PimEyes, but for a monthly subscription cost, the company offers enhanced features like alerts on photographs that users might be interested in when a new photo comes online.
Although there is a method to opt out of having one’s images in the PimEyes database, testing of the search tool indicate that it is not always a reliable means to exclude oneself from the company’s enormous collection of photos, as noted by TikTok users.
However, Gobronidze notes that PimEyes does not, in and of itself, create an individual’s identity.Now serving as CEO of PimEyes, an artificial intelligence research centre situated in Georgia, eastern Europe, is Giorgi Gobronidze, an academic. According to him, PimEyes employs roughly twelve individuals.He claimed in an interview with NPR that the tool’s misuse had been exaggerated, pointing out that the site’s detection algorithms had only caught a few hundred cases of users abusing the service for purposes such as child-finding or stalking.
The name of the person shown does not show up when someone searches PimEyes. Nevertheless, piecing together the pieces and determining an individual’s identity requires little more than online detective work.He declared, “We don’t identify people.” “We find websites that recognise images.”
According to PimEyes’ policies, users may only search for themselves or those who have given their permission. Even said, Gobronidze stated that “people are not as terrible as sometimes we like to imagine.” Nobody is prevented from searching another person at any time.
He went on to say: “PimEyes can be used for many legitimate purposes, like to protect yourself from scams,” he stated. “Or to figure out if you or a family member has been targeted by identity thieves.”According to Gobronidze, PimEyes has blocked access in 27 nations, including Iran, China, and Russia, because of concerns that the government would use the service to target dissidents and protestors.
