Privacy Nightmare: This site will show you “all the photos” of anyone on the web
Jun 11, 2020
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
Share:
Facial recognition technology has been causing quite a stir for a while now. While some are paranoid about it, others find it to be useful, life changing even. Well, now there’s a new website to be either paranoid or thrilled about. PimEyes allows you to upload just one photo of a person, and it will analyze the internet to see where else this person’s photos have been published.
PimEyes is Polish facial recognition website, it’s simple to use, and it’s free for everyone. You can upload an image from your computer or paste its URL, similar to Google image search. You can also take a photo with your webcam if you’re searching for a photo of yourself across the web. I tested it out just for fun, and I used this photo of Nikola Đuričko, one of my favorite Serbian actors. I had hundreds of results in return, and they were very accurate.
While PimEyes is free, there are also premium versions, available at €9.19, €13.99, and €18.99 per month at the time of writing this. Premium subscribers get different perks, such as alerts and dedicated personal support. Alerts allow you to get notified when new images of a person are uploaded, and you can save up to 25 of people to get alerted about.
According to OneZero, PimEyes is similar to Clearview AI, facial recognition software used by the police all over the world. However, it’s not as powerful and it doesn’t scrape social media sites, according to this source. PimEyes makers claim that they don’t save any images that you search.
Now, software like this can be useful in some cases. Apparently, they’re useful for the police and law enforcement agencies, but what about when they’re available to the public? They can be a useful tool for finding lost family, like this guy did. But they can also be a handy tool for stalkers and creeps of all sorts.
Personally, software like this creeps me out a bit. On the one hand, I’m aware that we all voluntarily share our everyday lives on social media. But on the other hand, it freaks me out to think just how simple it is for anyone to find you, anywhere on the web. What do you think of websites like this? Are you freaked out, or you don’t really care about it?
[via Boing Boing, OneZero]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
Join the Discussion
DIYP Comment Policy
Be nice, be on-topic, no personal information or flames.
14 responses to “Privacy Nightmare: This site will show you “all the photos” of anyone on the web”
I uploaded a selfie of myself and it didn’t work. I guess my beard fooled it because it just gave me a bunch of results showing other bearded guys.
What if someone does that to trump or obama face.
Yeah – loaded two different pics of me – one had no right matches of 36, the other 2 correct of over 300. Not much of a worry.
Clickbait, It found one photo of me and a bunch of faces that aren’t mine. to see the URL of the sites just cough up USD $13.99
Darrell, you nailed it. It is not more than the old Bait & Switch scam
Scam!
Well if the police rely on this technology they must be very disappointed.
Big scam. The results are meh.
I tried it. Uploaded a photo of me — the avatar you see on the left here. It returned 4 instances of that same photo. It then showed two comic self-portraits I created and uploaded recently. After that, the rest of the page were random people I have never heard of, many of which did not even remotely look like me.
IOW, fail…
Tried it with a photo (I do cyber security and don’t fall for this crap) of someone I have and it failed miserably. Nothing to see here folk, keep on browsing…
Pimeyes doesn’t allow upload (if it ever did), it’s locked to a fresh selfie only and there’s no way to get around it except maybe on a hacked system. So using a photo of someone else is not possible. Maybe if you photo a picture (not “easy” or “quick” at all, too much work for me to bother), but if Pimeyes is so good as claimed it will probably not be fooled by that either. So no “privacy nightmare” at all, just a lot of hooey.
Pimeyes doesn’t allow upload (if it ever did), it’s locked to a fresh selfie only (see screenshot) and there’s no way to get around it except maybe on a hacked system. So using a photo of someone else is not possible. Maybe if you photo a picture (not “easy” or “quick” at all, too much work for me to bother), but if Pimeyes is so good as claimed it will probably not be fooled by that either. So no “privacy nightmare” at all, just a lot of hooey. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e1649bfe7e31298ffdf6c65da80dbf9cf0a9cb2b15eaeea78ebf3070fa323a3b.png
Only returns pictures of people who don’t look remotely like the pictures uploaded. Additionally, while it apparently doesn’t search Facebook for pics, it does seem to search porn sites, which is weird.
That’s to find sex trafficking victims.