For $ 29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face by finding obscure images that would otherwise be as safe as the proverbial needle in the Internet’s huge digital haystack.
The search takes only seconds. You upload a photo of a person, check the box where you agree to the terms of the service, and then receive a grid of photos of people who are considered similar, with links to where they appear on the Internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times reporters, with their consent, to test his credentials.
PimEyes found photos of each person, some journalists had never seen before, even when wearing sunglasses or a mask or face turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search.
PimEyes found a reporter dancing at an art museum event a decade ago and crying after being offered a photo she didn’t particularly like, but the photographer had decided to use to advertise his Yelp business. The younger self of a technology reporter was spotted awkwardly attracting fans to the Coachella Music Festival in 2011. A foreign correspondent appeared in countless wedding photos, apparently the life of each party, and in the blurred background of a photo taken of someone else in Greek airport in 2019. The past life of a journalist in a rock band was discovered, as well as the preferred escape from another’s summer camp.
Unlike Clearview AI, a similar face recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites. Sometimes the surprising images that PimEyes comes up with come from news articles, wedding photo pages, review sites, blogs and pornography sites. Most of the coincidences for the dozen journalists were accurate.
For women, incorrect photos often came from pornographic sites, which was troubling on the assumption that they might be. (To be clear, they weren’t.)
A technical manager, who asked not to be identified, said he uses PimEyes quite regularly, mainly to identify people who harass him on Twitter and uses their real photos in their accounts, but not their real names. Another PimEyes user, who asked to remain anonymous, said he used the tool to find the real identities of pornographic actresses and search for explicit photos of his Facebook friends.
The new owner of PimEyes is Georgi Gobronidze, a 34-year-old academic who says his interest in modern technology has been sparked by Russian cyberattacks against his native Georgia.
Gobronidze said he believes PimEyes can be a tool for good, helping people monitor their online reputation.
“It’s design stalkerware, no matter what they say,” said Ella Jakubowska, a political adviser at European Digital Rights, a privacy group.
“Essentially blackmail”
A few months ago, Sher Scarlett, a computer engineer, tested PimEyes for the first time and was confronted with a chapter in her life that she was stubbornly trying to forget.
In 2005, when Scarlett was 19 and broke up, she considered working in pornography. She traveled to New York to audition, which was so insulting that she abandoned the idea.
PimEyes has revealed the trauma with links to exactly where the explicit photos can be found online. “Until now, I had no idea these images were on the Internet,” she said.
When she clicked on one of PimEyes’ explicit photos, a menu appeared that offered a link to the image, a link to the website where the PimEyes “opt out of public results” option appeared.
But the shutdown, Ms. Scarlett quickly discovered, is only available to subscribers who have paid for PROtect plans, which cost between $ 89.99 and $ 299.99 a month. “It’s essentially blackmail,” said Scarlett, who eventually signed on to the most expensive plan.
But when The Times searched Scarlett’s face with her permission a month later, there were more than 100 results, including the obvious.
Gobronidze said it was a “sad story”. Instead, it blocks PimEyes’ search results from any photos of “high-resemblance” faces during the opt-out, which means that people have to give up regularly, with multiple photos of themselves. Gobronidze said he wanted “ethical use” of PimEyes. But PimEyes doesn’t do much to enforce this, except for the box the searcher has to click on, stating that the person being uploaded is their own.
There are users that Gobronidze does not want. He recently blocked the website of people in Russia in solidarity with Ukraine. He mentioned that PimEyes is ready to offer its service for free to organizations if it can help in the search for missing persons.
The German Data Protection Agency has announced an investigation into PimEyes.
Gobronidze said he had not heard of any German authorities. “I’m looking forward to answering any questions they may have,” he said. He is not worried about privacy regulators, he said, because PimEyes works differently.
He described it as almost a catalog of digital maps, saying the company does not store photos or individual face templates, but rather URLs for individual images related to the facial features they contain.
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