The name is PimEyes and costs US $ 29.99 (R $ 142 at today’s price) per month to use. This is facial recognition software that, after uploading a photo, scans the Internet for images of the same person. And the New York Times report found and Digital Gaze confirmed that it was grimly accurate.
In the NYT tests, several members of the journalism team presented their test photos. PimEyes found photos they forgot existed or didn’t even know they were taken once.
publicity
One reporter was shown dancing at an art museum event more than a decade ago, and another was crying after receiving a marriage proposal – she didn’t like the last photo, but the photographer used it to advertise her business at Yelp.
A technology reporter was found at the Coachella Music Festival in 2011 in a crowd. A reporter appeared in a number of wedding photos and, blurred, in a photo taken at an airport in Greece.
The search worked even in the case of a person wearing sunglasses in the presented photo, looking away, with a mask or with a beard – finding photos without a beard (more on that at the end).
privacy concerns
PimEyes works by uploading a photo and clicking on a box, claiming that the photo is yours. Although several times on the site it is said that it is only for personal use, there is no brake beyond this box, the honesty of an anonymous person on the Internet. Nothing really prevents the user from uploading images of other people.
The program does not scan social networks, but opens sites such as news pages, forums, photographers’ albums and, most disturbingly, pornographic sites.
The idea, according to the company, is to be on the right side: to help a person find the abusive use of their own image and get rid of it. In theory, this can be used against, for example, giving revenge porn to remove abusive content from the airwaves. But it can also be used by one person to find other people’s unwanted photos.
In fact, one of the stories told by the NYT was that of computer engineer Cher Scarlett. In 2005, at the age of 19, she went bankrupt and auditioned for the porn industry. She hated him and immediately gave up on the idea. But through PimEyes, she discovered that her images were still in the air.
In the face recognition program itself, she found that there is an option to remove the photos: a premium PROTect plan, which costs up to $ 299.99. “This is basic blackmail,” she said, who paid for the most expensive plan.
According to NYT, PrimEyes claims to have returned the money to Scarlett and notes that there is a free plan to remove images, but it is a little difficult to find. In solidarity with Ukraine, the company also blocked Russian consumers.
My face recognition test
The platform allows a free trial of a simplified survey. While uploading my photo, I found several user profile photos on public websites and multiple versions of a photo I had uploaded to Reddit in 2020.
What happened then was that my dog ate my glasses and I had to make a jigsaw to see with only one lens. In the end, I got a Dragon Ball skin, which was more than 9k.
It’s no surprise that this image eventually went viral. And it’s very similar to the photo I uploaded, with the same beard and hair I wear today.
The surprise was at the end of the list, where he found a “potentially clear” photo (this is a false positive, of someone who looks good, obviously sings without a shirt; my music career is limited to karaoke).
And most surprising of all: a real photo of me from 2009, without a beard, with a pencil-painted mustache for a June party (this is in the lower left corner). If you presented me with today’s photo in 2009, I don’t think you would know me.
Tests with other photos again took the mountain out of my Dragon Ball meme and some obvious false positives, people who don’t even look like me (unlike the mysterious singer).
The free trial doesn’t show the links to where the photos were found, and it shows them blurry so you can’t reverse your search. Clicking on them takes you to a screen asking you to sign. It’s not hard to agree that if you find a photo problematic (I’m not), it may look like blackmail.
PrimEyes works mainly on the website. There is an application for Android, but as an APK (installation file that is not allowed by the official store). Since the address is obvious to anyone looking for the name PrimEyes, we will leave the link right on the home page: here it is. Please note that searching for others violates the terms of use of the site and may be in court and we can not we are responsible for the results of a third party site.
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