Facial Recognition Search Engine Unveils Where Your Face Has Been Around The Web
Image via Shutterstock
It’s not easy scrubbing your presence off the internet. Not only is erasing your digital footprint a taxing process, but it’s also impossible to control your face appearing in third-party uploads or in the background of someone else’s photos.
‘PimEyes’, a free search engine focused on facial recognition, promises to help you find more remnants of yourself through publicly accessible platforms such as online publications, YouTube, Tumblr, and WordPress blogs.
OneZero reports that the Polish web tool won’t be as sophisticated as Clearview AI, which is used by law enforcement organizations around the world, and can’t cull data from social media services. However, it supposedly endeavors to protect your privacy and weed out unauthorized image use.
While Google’s reverse image search turns up similar variations of photos you upload, the company told OneZero that there’s no facial recognition technology involved in this feature. You can upload a photo of yourself and only receive other images with alike backgrounds but characters who look little like you.
For more advanced technology, PimEyes offers a premium tier that lets visitors track which websites have been hosting images of their faces, as well as allows them to receive alerts whenever more photos of their faces have been uploaded. Users can also set up to 25 alerts to notify them when their face, or those of 24 other people, appears anywhere new. Developers can opt for a package that enables them up to 100 million monthly searches.
PimEyes says it has prepared special contracts for law enforcement that gives access to images in “darknet websites.” A partnership with facial recognition software Paliscope also lets PimEyes reach faces in documents and videos.
The search engine isn’t the first of its kind. The Guardian reports that a Russian tech company had launched a similar tool targeted at users who wanted to find women who looked like their dream partners, such as an ex or movie star. This search engine is no longer available, as the firm decided to focus its expertise elsewhere.
There’s a risk that tools like PimEyes could be more of a bane than a boon for security. Abusers of such programs might not upload photos showing their own faces, but those of people they wish to stalk. It’s also unclear how these sites gather such intimate facial data.
[via OneZone, cover image via Shutterstock]
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