PimEyes is a website that gives a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet.
A search takes a few seconds. After uploading a photo of a face, you can check a box agreeing to the terms of service, and then get a grid of photos of faces similar in appearance, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists to see if it could do anything.
Some of the photos of people that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, were found in the image used to conduct the search.
One reporter dancing at an art museum event a decade ago, and crying after being proposed to, a photo that she didn't like but that the photographer decided to use to advertise his business, was found by PimEyes. A tech reporter's younger self was seen in an awkward crush of fans at a music festival. A foreign correspondent appeared in a lot of wedding photos and in a blurry background of a photo taken of someone else at a Greek airport. A journalist's past life in a rock band was unearthed, as was another person's preferred summer camp.
PimEyes does not include results from social media sites. The surprising images that PimEyes surfaced came from news articles, wedding photography pages, review sites, and pornography websites. The faces of most of the journalists were correct. The suggestion that it could be the women was unnerving, as the incorrect photos often came from pornography sites. It was not them.
A tech executive who asked not to be identified said he used PimEyes frequently to identify people who harassed him on social media, but not their real names. Another PimEyes user who asked to stay anonymous said he used the tool to find the real identities of actresses from pornographic films and to search for explicit photos of his Facebook friends.
The new owner of PimEyes is an academic who says his interest in advanced technology was sparked by Russian cyberattacks on his home country of Georgia.
Mr. Gobronidze believed that PimEyes could help people keep tabs on their online reputation. The journalist who disliked the photo that the photographer was using could now ask him to take it off his page.
Mr. Gobronidze said that PimEyes users are supposed to only look for their own faces. He said he was relying on people to act unethically, and offering little protection against the technology's erosion of anonymity. PimEyes does not have controls in place to prevent users from searching for faces that are not their own, and suggests a user pay a hefty fee to keep damaging photos from following them forever.
"It's stalkerware by design no matter what they say", said a policy adviser at European Digital Rights.
Military conflict shadowed Mr. Gobronidze as a child. During the civil war that followed Georgia's independence from the Soviet Union, his kindergarten was bombed. The country was cut off from the world in 2008 when Russia invaded. He wanted to study the role of technological dominance in national security.
Mr. Gobronidze was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 He started his career as a professor at European University in Georgia.
Mr. Gobronidze said he was introduced to two people by one of his students at a university in Poland. He said that they were brilliant masterminds, but not interested in public attention.
Mr. Gobronidze said that they agreed to speak with him about their creation. He said they explained how their search engine used neural net technology to map the features of a face, in order to match it to faces with similar measurements, and that the program was able to learn over time how to best determine a match.
Mr. Gobronidze said that he felt like a person from the Stone Age when he first met them.
He kept in touch with the founders and watched as they got more and more attention in the media. In 2020, PimEyes claimed to have a new owner, who wanted to remain anonymous, and the corporate headquarters were moved from Poland to a tax haven in Africa.
The new owner of the site wanted to sell it, according to Mr. Gobronidze. He quickly set about gathering funds to make an offer, selling a seaside villa he had inherited from his grandparents and borrowing a large sum from his younger brother, Shalva Gobronidze. The professor wouldn't say how much he paid.
Mr. Gobronidze said that it wasn't as big an amount as someone might think.
In December, Mr. Gobronidze created a corporation to acquire PimEyes and registered it in the United Arab Emirates because of the low tax rate. He retained most of the site's small tech and support team, and hired a consulting firm to handle inquiries and regulatory questions.
Mr. Gobronidze has an office in downtown Tbilisi. Light fixtures are hanging loose from the ceiling.
She described him as "curious" and "stubborn."
It was difficult to imagine Giorgi as a businessman.
He is a businessman who owns a company that is steeped in controversy because of the question of whether we have a special right of control over images of us that we never expected to be found this way. If governments and big companies had the only access to facial recognition technology, it would be used to control people.
He is imagining a world where anyone can use facial recognition.
Cher Scarlett, a computer engineer, tried out PimEyes for the first time and was confronted with a chapter of her life that she had tried hard to forget.
She considered working in pornography when she was 19 years old. She went to New York City for an interview that was so bad she abandoned the idea.
The decades-old trauma was unearthed with links to where explicit photos could be found on the web. They were included in more recent portraits of Ms. Scarlett, who has been the subject of media coverage for a high-profile worker revolt she led at Apple.
She said that she had no idea that the images were on the internet.
In a Medium post she described how she was worried about how people would react to the images. 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.
The exclusion was only available to subscribers who paid for the _protct_ plans.
Mr. Gobronidze disagreed with that characterization. There is a free tool that can be used to remove results from the PimEyes index. He provided a receipt that showed that PimEyes had paid back the $299.99 plan.
Most visitors to the site come from the United States and Europe, according to Mr. Gobronidze. It makes most of its money from subscribers to its PROtect service, which includes help from PimEyes support staff in getting photos taken down from external sites.
People can have their data removed from the site, including the search images of their faces, for free. She provided a photo of her teenage self and a government-issued identification to opt out. She received a confirmation that her opt-out request had been accepted.
Your potential results containing your face are removed from the system, according to the email from PimEyes.
There were more than 100 results, including explicit ones, when The Times ran a PimEyes search of Ms. Scarlett's face.
Mr. Gobronidze said that opting out didn't stop a person from being searched. People need to opt out with multiple photos of themselves, because it blocks PimEyes' search results with high similarity levels.
Mr. Gobronidze compared explicit photos to the mythical beast Hydra.
He said to cut one head and two others appeared.
Mr. Gobronidze wanted PimEyes to use ethical usage, meaning that people only search for their own faces and not those of strangers.
The goal is not enforced beyond a box that a searcher must click to assert that the face being uploaded is his or her own. Helen Nissenbaum, a Cornell University professor who studies privacy, called this "absurd" unless the site had a searcher provide government identification.
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.
Mr. Gobronidze said the site would bar a user if they had more than 1,000 searches in a day. He mentioned that anyone who searched someone else's face without permission would be breaking European privacy law.
He said it should be the responsibility of the person using it.
Ms. Scarlett said she never thought she would speak out about what happened to her when she was 19, but felt compelled to after seeing the images.
She said that it would have been used against her. It shouldn't exist at all.
Mr. Gobronidze said he was open to other uses of PimEyes as long as they were ethical.
Each request to use a facial recognition tool for reporting purposes requires prior approval by a senior member of the masthead and our legal department.
Mr. Gobronidze doesn't want any of them. He blocked people in Russia from the site. He said that PimEyes was willing to give its service for free to Ukrainian organizations or the Red Cross if it could help in the search for missing persons.
There have been serious challenges in Europe and around the world for the better-known Clearview AI. Privacy regulators in Canada, Australia and parts of Europe have ordered Clearview to remove their citizens' photos from their database. Britain and Italy were fined millions of dollars.
The General Data Protection Regulation, which includes strict rules around the use of biometric data, was the subject of an investigation by a German data protection agency. The investigation is continuing.
Mr. Gobronidze said he was eager to answer any questions the German authorities might have.
He doesn't care about privacy regulators because PimEyes operates differently. He said that the company does not store photos or face templates but rather URLs for individual images associated with the facial features they contain. He said that it is all public and that PimEyes instructs users to only look for their own faces. It's not yet known whether that architectural difference matters to regulators.
Sheelagh gave research.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
