Why a search engine that scans your face is dangerous : NPR

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.

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. TikTok’s community guidelines ban content with personal information that could lead to stalking, identity theft and other crimes. But this particular video was still up on Wednesday morning.

Originally founded in 2017 by two computer programmers in Poland, it’s an AI tool that’s like a reverse image search on steroids it scans a face in a photo and crawls dark corners of the internet to surface photos many people didn’t even know existed of themselves in the background of restaurants or attending a concert.

via www.npr.org

When we were younger we wanted to be famous. Now we want to be anonymous.