If you haven’t been bothered enough by people searching for your name on Google, they can now search your face on the internet. The new facial recognition tool, PimEyes, seems to be coming out of a sci-fi movie.
PimEyes is basically Google but for face images. You can upload a face to the website and it will browse the web and return results in seconds. And the technology behind the platform is surprisingly impressive.
The service costs $ 29.99 a month, so there is a pay wall in front of the website. But beyond that, anyone can use PimEyes to search for photos of themselves or others that may exist online.
Image: The New York Times
A few New York Times reporters recently tested PimEyes to see how far the website is. And the results were understandably amazing.
The website was able to return images from past years that match the uploaded images. PimEyes was able to return images of users wearing sunglasses, hats and even masks. A journalist even found a picture of themselves in the middle of a crowd during Coachella in 2011.
Why is there a website like PimEyes in the first place?
Image: The New York Times
A service like this obviously raises some ethical issues. According to website owner Giorgi Gobronidze, users should only search for images of themselves or people who have consented to the search.
But there’s nothing stopping someone from looking at someone else’s face. Gobronidze told The Times that he trusts users to act “ethically” on PimEyes. And we all know that ethics tends to take a back seat to the Internet.
And what’s worse, it’s a feature that allows you to exclude the images you find of yourself from the public results of the website.
That’s a pretty decent feature, isn’t it? But this feature is only available to platform subscribers who pay for “PROtect plans.” And these plans can cost from $ 89.99 to $ 299.99 a month.
That sounds a lot like extortion to me. You can basically hide your images from PimEyes search results, but only if you open your wallet even more than the original subscription price.
While PimEyes shows impressive technology, it raises the old issue of most science fiction films: “We spent so much time trying to figure out if we could, that we never stopped to wonder if we should do it. ”
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Collaborating writer with a passion for games and technology. They were probably destroyed by some kids in the Rocket League.