HAVE you ever wondered how many pictures you’ve accidentally photobombed or where old images of you have ended up online?
Well, there’s a website that promises to show you all of that and more, for a price.
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PimEyes is a controversial website that emerged as a hobby project in 2017, before being commercialised in 2019.
It allows users to search the whole web for their face, and up until recently, nothing stopped you from searching for someone else’s.
For monthly subscriptions which range between £30.99 and an eyewatering £300.99 per month, users are granted significant internet trawling powers.
The company says it helps people protect themselves from “scammers, identity thieves, or people who use your image illegally” by showing them where their photos are being used without consent.
Depending on which subscription you have, PimEyes will even help draft up data protection ‘takedown notices’ to have images removed from websites.
However, the Polish company, which is thought to be Chinese state-owned, has already wound up on the radar of governments and regulators across Europe.
As part of a debate on CCTV and surveillance in February, Lord Strathcarron said AI search engines like PimEyes mean “absolutely anybody can be tracked and traced anywhere at any time.
“It is not hyperbolic to say that, if left unchecked, these applications will entirely alter our concept of privacy and be open sesame to snoopers, stalkers, blackmailers, cybercriminals and bad actors of every kind.”
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Germany has fined PimEyes late last year under GDPR over the “massive endangerment of the rights and freedoms of citizens” and a “lack of data protection compliance”, according to proceedings.
PimEyes slipped into hot water last month when it was revealed by Wired that the company’s ‘crawler’ teams had been scraping images of dead people from Ancestry.com to build up its database.
While the company has been subject to inquiries in both the UK and US, both have found no breaches in privacy law.
PimEyes director Giorgi Gobronidze wrote in a LinkedIn post last week: “I am proud to say that the inquiry that took place in the UK and the US were positive and showed that no #privacy regulations had been broken by our company.
“Against the backdrop of our corporate social responsibility policy, which has enabled us to help hundreds of people, facilitate the investigation of many crimes, rescue abducted children, trafficked women and girls,” he continued.
“The orchestrated nature of the disinformation campaign against our company raises the legitimate question of what exactly is the motive behind the so-called concerns of vigilante groups, individuals and organisations.”
One Twitter influencer, Kristen Ruby, said she liked PimEyes despite the controversy.
“The tool is controversial – but it is one of the best tools for finding who has used my face without my consent. I then send takedown notices,” she said, adding that “It’s disturbing but extremely valuable.”
However, a software engineer and a former developer for Apple has warned that the website is helping to promote ‘doxxing’ – which is the act of revealing someone’s personal information online and is a form of harassment.
“On websites like 4chan and Reddit, new threads appear daily for doxxing requests. Just last week, someone PimEyes’d me and threatened me,” Cher Scarlett wrote on Twitter.
“This company is a privacy and security mess.”
The anonymous blackmailer found Scarlett’s face in a sex trafficked video of her from 2005, when she was just 19-years-old.
The website has been dubbed a “stalkers dream” online.
PimEyes acts in a similar way to Google’s reverse image search but apparently uses AI image recognition to speed this process up.
Although Scarlett is doubtful over the sophistication of the technology.
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