#PimEyes

[mrv3000]

On TikTok, PimEyes has become a formidable tool for internet sleuths trying to identify strangers, with videos notching many millions of views showing how a combination of PimEyes, and other search tools, can, for example, figure out the name of a random cameraman at a Taylor Swift concert.

What. the Absolute. FUCK.

[monetizeme]

The technology, which marries Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes and some other tools, lets someone automatically go from face, to name, to phone number, and home address.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Online Privacy and Security Tips

I am a firm believer that people should be able to be anonymous and secure online. Over a lifetime of trial and error, I've slowly learned the best ways to protect myself, and I'd like to pass on that knowledge to anyone who wants to hear it.

Last updated May 2024 (added links to news articles about PimEyes being used to identify someone in real life)

Switch to Firefox for your main browser on Windows and Android

Avoid any browser based on the Chromium project (like Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome), as Google has a major conflict of interest that prevents it from truly having users' privacy interests at heart. It makes ~70-80% of its revenue from its highly targeted advertising business, for which it must collect as much information about you as possible. That means that no matter how badly certain parts of Google want to build privacy into the browser, business interests and pressure will always supersede them, or at least force a compromise that still enables some tracking. Firefox is owned and maintained by a non-profit, so it does not have that same conflict, and it shows in the features it builds (and does not build) and the way it treats its users.

I made a list of my favorite Firefox extensions if you want to make your internet experience more pleasant and/or more secure!

Note: on iOS (i.e. iPhones), Firefox' functionality is limited by Apple restrictions and I do not recommend it - using Safari with Extensions like Adguard or 1Blocker is more secure and will give you a better experience. I made a list of my favorite iOS Safari extensions too!

Use a reputable password manager

I suggest 1Password (avoid LastPass and all of the password managers built into browsers, they're not safe). A good password manager increases your online safety by:

Helping you avoid password reuse (a common cause of account hacking)

Generating complex passwords that are difficult to guess or decrypt, and

Allowing you to keep records of all the different sites you have accounts on (so you can quickly change passwords in the event of a breach or delete your accounts on them when they outlive their usefulness)

Delete old accounts you no longer need

If your data has been deleted, no one can steal and leak it if they manage to hack the company.

Sign up for alerts from HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP) to be notified when your data is leaked in a site hacking.

This allows you to quickly change your password, hopefully before anyone is able to decrypt it (if it wasn't stored properly) or use it (if it was easy to guess). If you have reused that password on other sites, be sure to change your password on those sites either.

Note that some leaks don’t actually have any info about what website they were stolen from; if criminals just dump a huge text file onto a hacking forum that has your username and an accompanying password in it, HIBP doesn’t necessarily know what site they hacked to get that info. This is where a password manager like 1Password will come in handy, because 1P can actually use HIBP’s API to check each of your passwords and see if any of them have been leaked before. It will alert you if you need to change a specific password, even if you weren’t aware that site had been hacked.

Note: 1P only sends the first 5 characters of the password hashes to HIBP, not the passwords themselves. You can read more about the feature and how it preserves your privacy here.

Assume all profile pictures on any site are public, and avoid using your face for them if possible

New AI-powered sites like PimEyes can take an image of you, identify your face, and search for it in other, unrelated images around the internet. I searched for myself using a recent image that had never been posted to the internet before, and it immediately identified me in completely separate images I was using as my profile pictures on Facebook and LinkedIn and provided links to my accounts there. In this new AI era, assume anyone who snaps a picture of you can link you to your identity on any website where you have publicly posted your face before. This is not hyperbole; fans used PimEyes to identify a cameraman at a Taylor Swift concert using nothing more than a screenshot of a video taken of him by a concertgoer. Note: for what it's worth, you can submit an opt-out request to PimEyes if you are worried about someone using it to find your accounts online, but it requires you to submit images of your face and your government ID to the company...

Never post the same (original) image on two accounts that you do want to keep separate

Even a simple reverse image search can allow someone to link your different sites together (i.e. don't post the same vacation sunset photo on both Facebook and Tumblr because anyone can use that to link those sites together. Even if your Facebook or Instagram images are private, a follower of yours on one of those sites could still find the Tumblr you are not comfortable sharing with anyone. Marking your Tumblr as hidden only discourages search engines from indexing it; shady companies can and will ignore that and index it anyway.

[xtrablak674]

2022 AfroPunk

PHOTOS BY EMMANUEL AGBEBLE

I was listening to NPR this morning and they had mentioned the AI driven app PimEyes which I had used previously to find photos of myself that are on the internet that I am aware of but don't have copies of. I found about ten more photos from last year's AfroPunk that I attended with my niece on her birthday week. I still marvel at my look which was literally put together right before we left the house that day utilizing things I had purchased just that morning.

[Toe to Head - Dismantle the look]

-Open toe sandals purchased in Jaipur India on a 2007 trip

- Thai fisherman pants made in Nepal bought on Etsy

- African Print corset purchased at L Train Vintage/Brooklyn

-Mud cloth sash purchased in Ghana on my 2011 trip

-Necklace by Alicia P

-Rainbow umbrella purchased that morning at the Brooklyn Museum gift shop

-Queen sunglasses purchased in Bedstuy at Rainbow

-Vintage Indian bangle and silver cuff purchased in India in 2007

-Attitude models own

[Photos by Emmanuel Agbeble]

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

PimEyes: Face Recognition Search Engine and Reverse Image Search

[gamesatwork]

e484 — n Card Monty

Games at Work podcast e484: n Card Monty with Andy, Michael and Michael — social and interpersonal evolution from technology advancements, data ownership, North Carolina and global supply chain impacts from hurricane Helene and a whole lot more!

Photo by Laine Cooper on Unsplash Published 7 October 2024 Co-hosts Andy, Michael and Michael start off the show with a follow on discussion from last week’s episode on the future of work and AR glasses.  This theme is not new at all to the Games at Work crew – many examples of the future of augmented reality coming through glasses can be found in the back catalogue – and some from more than a…

[reneleijen]

Gezichtenzoekmachine gaat zoekopdrachten naar kinderen blokkeren

Zoekmachine PimEyes gaat een detectiesysteem inzetten om zoekopdrachten naar kindergezichten te herkennen en te blokkeren. Dat kan kinderen in gevaar brengen, aldus ceo Giorgi Gobronidze. De maatregel is onderdeel van het ‘no harm’-beleid. Een algoritme gaat de leeftijden inschatten ‘om minderjarigen te identificeren’. Dat werkt volgens Gobronidze (nu nog) beter met 14-minners dan met oudere…

[rudeekane]

Retrouver toutes les photos de vous visibles sur internet avec « Pim Eyes » #pimeyes

[aktionfsa-blog-blog]

Gesichtserkennung als gefährliches Gesellschaftsspiel

Was suchen die Leute bei PimEyes?

Spätestens bei der Suche nach dem eigenen Doppelgänger hat man bereits verloren, weil man dafür das eigenen Bild hochgeladen hat. Damit wächst der Vorrat für die Gesichtserkennung täglich - und es sind bereits viele Hundert Millionen.

Die biometrischen Fotos für Ausweis und Pass, gegen die wir seit mehr als 10 Jahren protestieren und die der EuGH leider für rechtens hält, waren der Einstieg in die Gesichtserkennung. Nun ist auch das ein lukratives Privatgeschäft. Die Gefahren sind:

Meine Privatsphäre und meine Anonymität sind dahin.

Der/die Gesuchte kann jede/r sein, dessen Foto Ähnlichkeiten aufweist und von den einschlägigen Programmen aufgelistet wird.

War eine Verwechselung bisher ein "kleiner Irrtum", muss nun der Verwechselte seine Unschuld beweisen. Eine Umkehrung der Unschuldsvermutung  durch massenhafte False-Positives.

Menschen in autoritären Regimen können über ihr Gesicht identifiziert werden, wenn sie  öffentlich in Erscheinung treten.

Menschen, die ihren Beruf geheim halten wollen oder müssen, wie z.B. SexarbeiterInnen, erleiden Nachteile, wenn sie über die Gesichtserkennung identifiziert werden.

Da wir die Zeit nicht zurückdrehen können, müssen wir mit diesen fragwürdigen Angeboten leben. Es stellt sich also die Frage: Wie kann man diesen Markt regulieren und welche Regierung hat überhaupt ein Interesse daran?

Es würde an der Zeit sein, bei solchen Angeboten zu prüfen, ob sie für alle vorhandenen Fotos wirklich das Einverständnis des Besitzers vorzuliegen haben. Eine Sisyphus-Arbeit ...

Mehr dazu bei https://netzpolitik.org/2022/we-fight-for-your-digital-rights-die-erfassen-milliarden-gesichter-biometrisch-ohne-jede-zustimmung/

Kategorie[21]: Unsere Themen in der Presse Short-Link dieser Seite: a-fsa.de/d/3r8 Link zu dieser Seite: https://www.aktion-freiheitstattangst.org/de/articles/8228-20221201-gesichtserkennung-als-gefaehrliches-gesellschaftsspiel.htm

[dozydawn]

Wedding Bells, 1987.

Model: Tasha de Vasconcelos.

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

The Surprising Danger Lurking in Your Smart Glasses: A Wake-Up Call for Privacy

How Brilliant Innovations Can Be Misused and Abused, Causing Unnecessary Stress to the Public As a retired scientist and health advocate in many countries, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing incredible technological advances throughout my 53-year career in the healthcare industry. Privacy issues have always concerned me as they affect our mental health.  From early computing systems to the…

[stuffed-gutz]

SOURCE UNKNOWN, PLEASE SHARE SOURCE

Every once in a while when trying to source images, I find one that really stumps me. This is one of those images. While it's posted on a LOT of sites, none of them ever credit the artist. I've found reposts as far back as 2008, but cannot for the life of me find the original post.

I tried searching konachan, gelbooru, rule34, pixiv, DA, and so many more places that hosted reposts of this image, with no luck at all. None.

I tried saucenao, yandex, IQDB, TinEye, Google Lens, PimEyes, basically everything I could find. I only found more reposts.

Whoever drew this image you are, for now, lost to time... I spent hours looking and nothing. RIP.

I didn't want to post it initially, but I'm hoping someone somewhere might actually know who drew this.

[fruit-kick]

Hello, I'm from Gaza City because of the war,my house was destroyed. We lost everything,my family and I did not have anything left. We left our homes in search of a safe place and we were displaced three  times to different places to survive, but unfortunately there's no safe place in Gaza. My mother is very sick and she's a kidney failure patient in need of treatment outside. She suffers from LS. Help me and my family to survive. Please, your small donation can make a huge difference. A friend outside Gaza has come in to help me run the donation program so that my mother can be evacuated

***hey, i'm pretty sure is a scam.*** the origin of this scammer's pfp comes from haya orouq who has both a gofundme (link to their gofundme) and a tiktok account. (link to their tiktok)

the asker's paypal is under the name of "fred odhiambo" who is not mentioned anywhere near the gofundme.

if you would like to donate to help palestinians, please considering sending your money over to haya orouq, since at the time of writing they've only raised about 14 thousand dollars out of 35 thousand. you can also check out operation olive branch (link to the google docs) which has a list of fundraisers for many families in palestine.

please make sure to double check every fundraising ask you receive, i've seen a few ppl fall for it before. there are many resources like duplichecker and pimeyes to pinpoint the origin of specific photos. a simpler way is also by entering their url into the search bar and seeing if anyone else's called them out for being a scammer. donate wisely.

[meret118]

Imagine strolling down a busy city street and snapping a photo of a stranger then uploading it into a search engine that almost instantaneously helps you identify the person.

This isn't a hypothetical. It's possible now, thanks to a website called PimEyes, considered one of the most powerful publicly available facial recognition tools online.

[mariacallous]

Finding out Taylor Swift was her 11th cousin twice-removed wasn’t even the most shocking discovery Cher Scarlett made while exploring her family history. “There’s a lot of stuff in my family that’s weird and strange that we wouldn’t know without Ancestry,” says Scarlett, a software engineer and writer based in Kirkland, Washington. “I didn’t even know who my mum’s paternal grandparents were.”

Ancestry.com isn’t the only site that Scarlett checks regularly. In February 2022, the facial recognition search engine PimEyes surfaced non-consensual explicit photos of her at age 19, reigniting decades-old trauma. She attempted to get the pictures removed from the platform, which uses images scraped from the internet to create biometric “faceprints” of individuals. Since then, she’s been monitoring the site to make sure the images don’t return.

In January, she noticed that PimEyes was returning pictures of children that looked like they came from Ancestry.com URLs. As an experiment, she searched for a grayscale version of one of her own baby photos. It came up with a picture of her own mother, as an infant, in the arms of her grandparents—taken, she thought, from an old family photo that her mother had posted on Ancestry. Searching deeper, Scarlett found other images of her relatives, also apparently sourced from the site. They included a black-and-white photo of her great-great-great-grandmother from the 1800s, and a picture of Scarlett’s own sister, who died at age 30 in 2018. The images seemed to come from her digital memorial, Ancestry, and Find a Grave, a cemetery directory owned by Ancestry.

PimEyes, Scarlett says, has scraped images of the dead to populate its database. By indexing their facial features, the site’s algorithms can help those images identify living people through their ancestral connections, raising privacy and data protection concerns, as well as ethical ones.

“My sister is dead,” Scarlett says. “She can’t consent or revoke consent for being enrolled in this.”  

Ancestry spokesperson Katherine Wylie tells WIRED that the site’s customers maintain ownership and control over their data, including family trees, and that its terms and conditions “prohibit scraping data, including photos, from Ancestry’s sites and services as well as reselling, reproducing, or publishing any content or information found on Ancestry.”

Giorgi Gobronidze, PimEyes’ director, tells WIRED: “PimEyes only crawls websites who officially allow us to do so. It was … very unpleasant news that our crawlers have somehow broken the rule.” PimEyes is now blocking Ancestry’s domain and indexes related to it are being erased, he says.

Ancestry’s database is the largest in the increasingly expanding genealogy industry, with more than 30 billion records—including photos and documents from public records—covering 20 million people. Users can access these records to make family trees. Whenever a user makes a family tree public on the site, deceased people’s photos can be seen by any registered user. Living people aren’t viewable in family trees unless tree creators authorize specific accounts to see them. Users can decide what is private or public on their profiles, which are searchable in Ancestry’s member directory.

PimEyes positions itself as a tool for people to monitor their online presence. The company charges users $20 to find the websites where their photos have been found, upwards of $30 a month for multiple searches, and $80 to exclude specific photos from future search results.

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. (Gobronidze, who took over PimEyes in January 2022, says that this criticism predates his tenure at PimEyes, and that the company’s policies have since changed.)

“They are clearly crawling all sorts of random websites,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at digital rights group Access Now. “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 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.

“If in some way the picture of the dead person … could lead to someone living being likely to be identified, then it could be protected under the GDPR,” says Edwards. This can be done by putting two bits of information together, she adds, such as a photo from PimEyes and information from Ancestry. PimEyes makes itself available in Europe, so it is subject to the legislation.

Scarlett worries that PimEyes’ technology could be used to identify people and then dox, harass, or abuse them—a concern shared by human rights organizations. She says her mom’s name, address, and phone number were just a reverse image search and three clicks away from the family photo scraped from Ancestry.

While it positions itself as a privacy tool, there are few barriers stopping PimEyes users from searching any face. Its home screen gives little indication that it’s intended for people to search only for themselves.

Gobronidze tells WIRED that PimEyes launched a “multistep security protocol” on January 9 to prevent people from searching multiple faces or children; PimEyes’ partners, however, including certain NGOs, are “whitelisted” to perform unlimited searches. PimEyes has so far blocked 201 accounts, Gobronidze says.

However, a WIRED search for Scarlett and her mother—conducted with their permission—retrieved matches unchallenged. WIRED also found evidence of online message-board users with subscriptions taking requests from others to identify women with pictures found online.

Gobronidze says the system is still in the “training process.”

In Washington state, Scarlett filed a consumer complaint about PimEyes to the state’s attorney general and has opted out using its “opt out” form, which promises to remove people’s data from its system, twice—once in March 2022 and again in October after her face reappeared. 

Scarlett’s mother also opted out in January 2023, she says. However, searches by WIRED revealed both their faces were still surfaced by the platform on March 1.

Gobronidze says that PimEyes erased over 22 results of Scarlett after her first request and 400 after the second, and performed a search using the photo she opted out with, failing to locate any images of her in its database. However, if a user opts out with a specific photo, other images may still appear. The “opt out engine will not work with 100 percent efficiency always,” Gobronidze said.

Legal scrutiny is intensifying for AI companies that populate their databases by crawling the web for faces. Clearview AI, a company that mainly sells facial recognition services to law enforcement, is facing a class action in Illinois and fines for breaking data protection laws across Europe, including the UK, where the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), an independent watchdog, ordered the company to delete all residents’ data. Clearview has denied misconduct and argued that it shouldn’t be subject to neither European data protection laws nor the jurisdiction of the ICO.

In November, UK-based rights group Big Brother Watch submitted a legal complaint about PimEyes to the ICO for “unlawful processing” of people’s data. Germany’s state commissioner for data protection has opened proceedings against the site for processing biometric data. Gobronidze says the company has been “proactively submitting” information to the ICO.

Gobronidze says it is “absolutely impossible” to establish identities using its database. “We gather index data, which connects photographs not with human individuals but to the URL addresses which publish those photographs.” PimEyes says it indexes photos but does not store the images themselves. Gobronidze adds that PimEyes does not process photos to establish identities but to find website addresses. “PimEyes does not identify human beings but only URLs,” he said.

Leufer, however, says PimEyes is “significantly enabling and facilitating the process of identification of people” based on photos. “While I think he’s correct to say that PimEyes won’t directly through their website give you that person’s identity, you’re a click away from a website that does have their name on it,” he says. “It’s going to give you a load of URLs which in many cases will allow you to identify that person.”

Scarlett fears those links could expose entire families to privacy violations.

“I used [Ancestry] for what it’s intended for—to find out where I come from. It was really exciting until it wasn’t,” she says. “Nobody is uploading photos into Ancestry thinking that they’re going to be enrolled into a biometric identifier for facial recognition software without their knowledge or consent … It just feels incredibly violating.”