A popular image search website can seriously erode your real-life privacy, according to a report by The New York Times.
Journalist Kashmir Hill tested PimEyes, a $ 30-a-month facial search engine that turned out to be terribly comprehensive and accurate. After posting photos of the faces of a dozen Times employees on the site and checking a service terms agreement, the site returned a rather nightmare result.
As Hill points out, “PimEyes found photos of all the people, some of whom journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or with their faces apart from the camera, in the image used by carry out the research. ”
Journalists’ images included one from an art museum a decade ago, a photograph of a crowd at a music festival, and even a photo of a stranger taken at a Greek airport in 2019 in which the journalist appears in the background.
Worse: PimEyes was not looking for social networking sites to get these photos, but was deleting news articles, wedding photo pages, review sites, blogs, and even porn pages, and the mistakes that the search engine normally made. they came from misidentifying women journalists as journalists. possibly people appearing in these adult sites. And while you’re only “supposed” to use PimEyes to search for your face or that of the people who consented to the search, there’s nothing stopping anyone from circumventing this fragile protection.
The site is not technically new, but it was bought last year by Giorgi Gobronidze, a 34-year-old academic from Georgia, who believes that something good can come out of the site (like people who control their online reputation). . ). Apparently, in a weird piece of news, the website didn’t seem to have a problem identifying people with darker skin tones, so … the scary technology behind PimEyes isn’t racist. Hurray?
There are options to “exclude” photos from the results, but this requires a significant payment as part of an additional “PROtect plan”. (PimEyes says they offer a free tool, but it’s apparently hard to find.) And a free “exclusion” image removal service apparently didn’t work when the Times tried it.
While German authorities are currently investigating PimEyes, Gobronidze believes the site can still be used permanently, noting that he approved that investigative journalists use it to identify people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021. It has also blocked the use of people from Russia. the site, but says it is willing to allow Ukrainian citizens or Red Cross staff to use it for free to identify missing persons.
Facial search engines may have a purpose, but even talking about the idea in terms of law enforcement or investigative journalism raises many privacy issues. Also, the idea that you should pay money to exclude photos from searches and not work is “essentially extortion,” as one PimEyes user put it.
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