An investigation by The Intercept has put PimEyes at the center of a troubling scandal that facilitates the accessibility of child sexual abuse material online.
What is PimEyes?
PimEyes is a search engine, but in a world of Googles, Bings and Yahoos, this particular AI invention is in a dystopian world: a tool that has the ability to search and find any face deep in murky corners. of internet For $29.99 a month, PimEyes lets you search in seconds with just one photo.
The New York Times tested the search engine and, with the consent of its reporters, scoured the web for more photos of them. If you upload the image of the person you want to find, in addition to accepting the terms and conditions, a frame of faces will be drawn in the form of a grid that the search engine has deemed similar to the original provided. And for publication, the results were immediate and deeply troubling.
PimEyes had managed to locate several photos of each reporter, providing image results that some of the individuals had never seen before. What’s worse is that he was able to do this skillfully and accurately without even needing a clear starting image for the search. The New York Times noted that despite sunglasses or masks being used to hide the face, or even when using images where faces are turned away from the camera, PimEyes was still able to use this image to find more accuracy of the person in question.
It was initially created in 2017 by two Polish developers and then passed through several owners before ending up in the hands of international relations scholar Giorgi Gobronidze, who had met the couple behind the engine while lecturing at poland
PimEyes is Clearview AI, but for the public
Simply put, the search engine has been described by many as the “public Clearview AI,” a powerful facial recognition tool only available to law enforcement. The last widely publicized use of Clearview AI has been in the context of war, with Ukraine making headlines for its use of AI technology against Russia.
That in itself doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous than PimEyes: the use of facial recognition in government worries those who would predict a Big Brother-like future. However, where Clearview AI data is only available to the respective authorized bodies, PimEyes offers that access to everyone, and with little regulation, it’s only a matter of time before it manifests into a recipe for disaster. In fact, the search engine’s new owner, Gobronidze, said there was a heavy reliance (and expectation) on individuals to simply act “ethically” when using PimEyes, according to The New York Times.
It is these murky, unregulated waters that have created an environment where search engine usage is dangerously rampant.
Is PimEyes used for good or bad?
After a thorough and thorough investigation by The Intercept, the use of PimEyes and its unregulated world has, once again, been called into question. The publication pointed to the search engine being used as a weapon of abuse, a tool that has been shown to “retrieve ‘potentially explicit’ photos of children” in its searches.
By using fake images of children to conduct its searches, The Intercept found that PimEyes allowed anyone to search for images of minors across the Internet. A terribly worrying discovery, the publication cites. The fake image used in the search pulled real child results from a variety of sources, including blogs and personal family websites. If he can do that with fake pictures of children, imagine what he could do with real pictures.
What made matters worse was that PimEyes would even provide the source link from which the image was found; theoretically, it’s an incredibly easy path for stalkers and predators to find and locate children in images. Not only could this mean predators can obtain more illicit images of the same child, but it could also be used to stalk their victims. The previously mentioned murky and unclear waters for this device only got dirtier after The Intercept’s interview with the owner of the AI tool.
In what was described as a “vague and sometimes contradictory account” of PimEyes’ privacy regulations, Gobronidze claimed that its primary use was not researching other people, but researching one’s own image. Internet and clean it wherever you want. He suggested that the main subscriber count consisted of women and girls looking for revenge images of themselves. However, according to The Intercept, there are no checks to prevent anyone but yourself from being searched.
Does PimEyes search social media?
If you could believe it, the search engine was even worse before certain elements were removed. According to research and reports found by Futurism, in the face of previous backlash, the developers of the program decided to reduce the search power of PimEyes.
Before its justified criticism, the search engine was even able to crawl social media sites for images, and according to SCREENSHOT’s investigation into the world of pedophile rings that take advantage of kidfluencer’s content in social media, it’s safe to say that The Intercept’s findings might have been even. wider if it had still been like that. In fact, Gobronidze suggested in the post that while it’s true that it’s “tailor-made for stalkers,” PimEyes had “subsequently cleaned up its act by stopping trolling social media,” Futurism reported.