Facial Recognition At It’s Worst

It seems there’s always something creepy happening on the internet. This week’s information is about a Facial Recognition Website that’s already crawled the web for photos to use in its database.

The site is PimEyes.com
PimEyes positions itself as a tool for people to monitor their online presence. The company, which has trawled social media for images but now says it scrapes only publicly available sources, has been criticized for collecting images of children and accused of facilitating stalking and abuse. Ancestry.com and FindaGrave.com, a cemetery directory owned by Ancestry, have been crawled and indexed without getting anyone’s permission to do so. Ancestry.com houses more than 30 BILLION records – including photos and documents from public records covering 20 Million people.

They are clearly crawling all sorts of random websites. There’s something very grim, especially about the obituary ones.”

The dead aren’t generally protected under privacy laws, but processing their image and data isn’t automatically fair game, says Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Just because the data doesn’t belong to a living person anymore does not automatically mean you are allowed to take it. If it’s a person who has died, we have to figure out who has rights over it.”

The European Convention of Human Rights has ruled that pictures of dead people can have a privacy interest for the living, according to Lilian Edwards, professor of law, innovation, and society at Newcastle University in the UK, who says that using photos of the living mined from the web without consent can also be a potential violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which prohibits the processing of biometric data to identify people without their consent.

Simply putting two or more bits of information together such as a photo from PimEyes and information from Ancestry.com, it’s pretty easy to identify the person.

As for Ancestry.com. Many, many years ago, I considered creating MY family tree online. As I gathered more and more information from living relatives, I started to understand that this was really not such a good idea. Although developing a family tree is a good idea, uploading all that personal data to an internet website is certainly not.

While PimEyes positions itself as a privacy tool, there are few barriers stopping PimEyes users from searching any face. Its home page gives little indication that it’s intended for people to search only for themselves. All you need is a photo (of anyone) to start a search.

On its website, PimEyes maintains that people should only use the tool to search for their own faces, claiming that the service is “not intended for the surveillance of others and is not designed for that purpose.” But the company offers subscriptions that allow people to perform dozens of unique searches a day; the least expensive package, at $29.99 a month, offers 25 daily searches. People who shell out for the premium service can set alerts for up to 500 different images or combinations of images, so that they are notified when a particular face shows up on a new site.

It’s important to understand that, as consumers, we have no expectation of privacy when posting pictures on Facebook or any other website or social media platform.