PIM Eyes the cost of oblivion or blackmail?

[david44]

A face search engine anyone can use is alarmingly accurat

PimEyes, a website that charges $29.99 per month, offers a potentially dangerous superpower in science fiction: the ability search for a face and find obscure photos. This is a site called PimEyes.

A search takes just seconds. Upload a photo of your face, tick a box to agree to the terms of the service, and you will receive a grid of photos that are similar to yours, along with links to their locations on the internet. To test its power, the New York Times used PimEyes to examine the faces of 12 Times journalists.


PimEyes uncovered photos of every person. Some were new to the journalists, even if they were wearing sunglasses, a mask or their face was turned towards the camera.


PimEyes found one reporter dancing at an art museum event a decade ago, and crying after being proposed to, a photo that she didn’t particularly like but that the photographer had decided to use to advertise his business on Yelp. A tech reporter’s younger self was spotted in an awkward crush of fans at the Coachella music festival in 2011. In countless wedding photos, a foreign correspondent was visible. A journalist’s past life in a rock band was unearthed, as was another’s preferred summer camp getaway.




PimEyes is not compatible with Clearview AI (a similar facial recognition tool only available to law enforcement), and does not include results from any social media sites. PimEyes found surprising images from news articles, reviews, blogs, and pages devoted to wedding photography. Most of the matches for the dozen journalists’ faces were correct. For women, the incorrect photos were often taken from pornographic websites, which was troubling in that it was possible they were the culprit. It was not them.
An anonymous tech executive said that he uses PimEyes quite often to identify harassers on Twitter and to use their real photos on his accounts, but not their real names. Another PimEyes user, who requested anonymity, said that he used the tool in order to identify actresses from pornographic movies and search for explicit photos with his Facebook friends.
PimEyes’ new owner is Giorgi Gobronidze (a 34-year old academic who claims his interest in advanced technology was sparked after Russian cyberattacks against his home country, Georgia.
Gobronidze stated that he believes PimEyes can be a tool for good and help people keep track of their online reputation. For example, a journalist might dislike a photograph taken by a photographer and ask him to remove it from his Yelp page.
Gobronidze stated that PimEyes users should only search for their own faces or those of others who have consented to it. But he said he was relying on people to act “ethically,” offering little protection against the technology’s erosion of the long-held ability to stay anonymous in a crowd. PimEyes doesn’t have any controls to prevent users searching for faces other than their own. It suggests that users pay a substantial fee to remove damaging photos from ill-considered nights from being followed forever.
“It’s stalkerware by design no matter what they say,” said Ella Jakubowska, a policy adviser at European Digital Rights, a privacy advocacy group.
Under new management

Gobronidze was raised in the shadows of military conflict. His kindergarten was bombed in the civil war that followed Georgia’s 1991 declaration of independence from the Soviet Union. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia and the internet was shut down. This effectively cut the country off from the outside world. These experiences inspired him to research the role of technology dominance in national security.
After stints working as a lawyer and serving in the Georgian army, Gobronidze got a master’s degree in international relations. He started his career as an academic in 2014. He eventually landed at the European University in Tbilisi (Georgia), where he teaches.
In 2017, Gobronidze was in an exchange program, lecturing at a university in Poland, when one of his students introduced him, he said, to two “hacker” types — Lucasz Kowalczyk and Denis Tatina — who were working on a facial search engine. They were “brilliant masterminds,” he said, but “absolute introverts” who were not interested in public attention.
Gobronidze stated that they agreed to talk with him about their creation, eventually becoming PimEyes. He explained that their search engine used neural net technology, which maps the features of a face to match it with faces with similar measurements. The program was able over time to learn how to determine the best match


“I felt like a person from the Stone Age when I first met them,” Gobronidze said. “Like I was listening to science fiction.”
He said that he kept in touch with founders and watched as PimEyes started getting more attention in the media, especially the scathing kind. PimEyes claimed that they had a new owner in 2020. He wished to remain anonymous and the corporate headquarters were relocated from Poland to Seychelles. Seychelles is a popular African tax haven.
Gobronidze said he “heard” sometime last year that this new owner of the site wanted to sell it. He quickly gathered funds to make an offer. He sold a seaside villa that he had inherited his grandparents and borrowed a large amount from Shalva Gobronidze (a software engineer at a banking bank). The professor refused to reveal the amount he had paid.
“It wasn’t as big an amount as someone might expect,” Gobronidze said.
In December, Gobronidze created a corporation, EMEARobotics, to acquire PimEyes and registered it in Dubai because of the United Arab Emirates’ low tax rate. He said he had retained most of the site’s small tech and support team, and hired a consulting firm in Belize to handle inquiries and regulatory questions.


Gobronidze rented office space in downtown Tbilisi for PimEyes. It is still being renovated. There are light fixtures hanging from the ceiling.
Tatia Dolidze, a colleague of Gobronidze’s at European University, described him as “curious” and “stubborn,” and said she had been surprised when he told her that he was buying a face search engine.
“It was difficult to imagine Giorgi as a businessman,” Dolidze said by email.
Now, he is a businessman and owns a company that has been a source of controversy. This revolves around whether we have any special rights to control images of us that were not expected to be found in this way. Gobronidze claimed that facial recognition technology could be used for controlling people if only governments or large corporations had access to it.


He envisions a world where facial recognition can be used by everyone.
‘Essentially extortion’

Cher Scarlett (a computer engineer) tried PimEyes a few months ago. She was confronted by a chapter of her past that she had tried to forget.
Scarlett was 19 years old and broke when she began to consider working in pornography. Scarlett went to New York City for an audition. It was so humiliatingly and abusive that she gave up the idea.
PimEyes discovered the decades-old trauma and provided links to the exact photos on the internet. They were inserted amongst other recent portraits of Scarlett who works on labor rights. This was in response to the media coverage of a high-profile worker revolt that Scarlett led at Apple.
“I had no idea up until that point that those images were on the internet,” she said.
Scarlett was concerned about how people would respond to the images and immediately started looking into ways to remove them. This experience Scarlett described in a Medium post, as well as CNN. When she clicked on one of the explicit photos on PimEyes, a menu popped up offering a link to the image, a link to the website where it appeared and an option to “exclude from public results” on PimEyes.
But exclusion, Scarlett quickly discovered, was available only to subscribers who paid for “PROtect plans,” which cost from $89.99 to $299.99 per month. “It’s essentially extortion,” said Scarlett, who eventually signed up for the most expensive plan.
Gobronidze disagreed. He pointed out a free tool that allows you to delete results from the PimEyes Index. This tool is not advertised on the site. He also provided a receipt that showed that Scarlett was refunded $299.99 for the PimEyes plan.
Gobronidze stated that PimEyes has thousands of subscribers. Most visitors to the site come from Europe and the United States. It makes most of its money from its PROtect service subscribers, which includes support staff from PimEyes for getting photos taken down from other sites.
PimEyes has a free “opt-out” as well, for people to have data about themselves removed from the site, including the search images of their faces. Scarlett provided a photo and scan of her government-issued identification to opt out. She received confirmation at the beginning of April that her opt-out request was accepted.
“Your potential results containing your face are removed from our system,” the email from PimEyes said.
But when the Times ran a PimEyes search of Scarlett’s face with her permission a month later, there were more than 100 results, including the explicit ones.


Gobronidze said that this was a “sad story” and that opting out didn’t block a person’s face from being searched. Instead, it blocks from PimEyes’ search results any photos of faces “with a high similarity level” at the time of the opt-out, meaning people need to regularly opt out, with multiple photos of themselves, if they hope to stay out of a PimEyes search.
Gobronidze stated that explicit photos are particularly difficult, and compared their proliferation online to the mythical Hydra.
“Cut one head and two others appear,” he said.
Gobronidze said he wanted “ethical usage” of PimEyes, meaning that people search only for their own faces and not those of strangers.
PimEyes has little to do with this goal. A searcher must click a box to affirm that the face being uploaded belongs to him or her. Helen Nissenbaum, a Cornell University professor who studies privacy, called this “absurd,” unless the site had a searcher provide government identification, as Scarlett had to when she opted out.
“If it’s a useful thing to do, to see where our own faces are, we have to imagine that a company offering only that service is going to be transparent and audited,” Nissenbaum said.
PimEyes does no such audits, though Gobronidze said the site would bar a user with search activity “beyond anything logical,” describing one with more than 1,000 searches in a day as an example. He is relying on users to do what’s right and mentioned that anyone who searched someone else’s face without permission would be breaking European privacy law.
“It should be the responsibility of the person using it,” he said. “We’re just a tool provider.”
Scarlett stated that although she didn’t think she would ever talk about what happened to Scarlett when she was 19, she felt the need to do so after realizing that the images were out.
“It would have been used against me,” she said. “I’m glad I’m the person who found them, but to me, that’s more about luck than PimEyes working as intended. It shouldn’t exist at all.”
Exceptions to this rule

Despite saying PimEyes should be used only for self-searches, Gobronidze is open to other uses as long as they are “ethical.” He said he approved of investigative journalists and the role PimEyes played in identifying Americans who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Times allows journalists to use facial recognition search engines for reporting, but has its own rules. “Each request to use a facial recognition tool for reporting purposes requires prior review and approval by a senior member of the masthead and our legal department to ensure the usage adheres to our standards and applicable law,” said a Times spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha.
There are users Gobronidze doesn’t want. In solidarity with Ukraine, he recently blocked Russian users from the site. He mentioned that PimEyes, like Clearview AI was available to offer its services for free to Ukrainian organizations and the Red Cross, if it could assist in the search for missing people.
Clearview AI, a more well-known AI, has been facing serious headwinds in Europe as well as around the globe. Privacy regulators in Canada, Australia and parts of Europe have declared Clearview’s database of 20 billion face images illegal and ordered Clearview to delete their citizens’ photos. Britain and Italy both imposed multimillion-dollar penalties.
A German data protection agency announced an investigation into PimEyes last year for possible violations of Europe’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, which includes strict rules around the use of biometric data. This investigation is still ongoing.
Gobronidze stated that he had never heard from any German authorities. “I am eager to answer all of the questions they might have,” he said.
He said that he is not concerned about privacy regulators because PimEyes operates in a different way. He described it as a digital card catalog. The company does not store individual faces or photos, but URLs for individual images that are associated with facial features. It’s all public, he said, and PimEyes instructs users to search only for their own faces. It is not yet clear if this architectural difference matters to regulators.


This article appeared originally in The New York Times.

A Face Search Engine Anyone Can Use Is Alarmingly Accurate - The New York Times

[baldrick]

should I save our resident stalkers some money ?

no