"'Too dangerous': Why even Google was afraid to release this technology" 11 October 2023

Imagine strolling down a busy city street and snapping a photo of a stranger then uploading it into a search engine that almost instantaneously helps you identify the person. This isn't a hypothetical. It's possible now, thanks to a website called PimEyes, considered one of the most powerful publicly available facial recognition tools online.

On TikTok, PimEyes has become a formidable tool for internet sleuths trying to identify strangers, with videos notching many millions of views showing how a combination of PimEyes, and other search tools, can, for example, figure out the name of a random cameraman at a Taylor Swift concert. TikTok's community guidelines ban content with personal information that could lead to stalking, identity theft and other crimes. But this particular video was still up on Wednesday morning.

Originally founded in 2017 by two computer programmers in Poland, it's an AI tool that's like a reverse image search on steroids — 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 in the background of restaurants or attending a concert.

While the company claims it is a service that can help people monitor their online presence, it has generated controversy for its use as a surveillance tool for stalkers, collecting countless images of children and for adding images of dead people to its database without permission.

Without any federal laws on the books in the U.S. governing facial recognition technology, services copying PimEyes are expected to proliferate in the coming years....

...Giorgi Gobronidze, an academic who studies artificial intelligence based in Georgia in eastern Europe, is now CEO of PimEyes, which he said has a staff of about 12 people...."We don't identify people," he said. "We identify websites that identify images similar to the search material...PimEyes can be used for many legitimate purposes, like to protect yourself from scams," he said. "Or to figure out if you or a family member has been targeted by identity thieves."

Gobronidze said PimEyes now blocks access in 27 countries, including Iran, China and Russia, over fears government authorities could use the service to target protesters and dissidents...