This Facial Recognition Search Engine Is Exploiting Children’s Images and Worse

While PrimEyes systematically targets individuals who look for children's pictures, it is a challenge for their engineers to remove children from the search.

The facial recognition website, PimEyes has been at the centre of controversy since long for a reason. It's not that people are making revenge porn or it being used for sentiment analysis without due permission from the users, or making the data available for commercial benefits. It's only and only about making questionable images of children with data scrapped from the web. An investigation by The Intercept reveals these details. Indeed, it is a serious manifestation of facial recognition technology and commands for a deeper scrutiny. Also recognized as Google of facial recognition, its search engine is widely used by a variety of users from people wanting to be a part of every wedding they want to attend or be a part of music festivals they adore. These might seem rather harmless – though come with secondary effects such as losing data without having to give consent – there are cases it has been used for abuse and otherwise. If abusive parents searching for their fleeing children sheltered in shelter homes or stalkers looking for their victims is one part of the misuse of this app, there are people who do use it to identify people who harass them on social media platforms. Jeremy Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says, "There are privacy issues raised by the use of facial recognition technology writ large. But it's particularly dangerous when we are talking about children, when someone may use that to identify a child and track them down."

When The Intercept tried to search for fake faces, they ended up with images from a wide range of sources. Earlier too it was under thick controversy for sourcing pictures from social media platforms. This time a huge swath of pictures came from sources including shelter homes, charity institutes, and personal websites, where parents who openly and anonymously posted their children's pictures. In 2020, in an article published by Jane Wakefield, in BBC, the author quotes Silkie Carlo, Director of Big Brother Watch,"To see this powerful surveillance tech marketed to individuals is chilling. It's ripe for stalking and puts women and children at unprecedented risk." PimEyes was initially developed by two Polish developers in 2017. And after passing over different hands it finally landed with Georgian international relations scholar, Giorgi Gobronidze, at a lecture meeting in Poland, where he met the site's creators. The company promoted it as an online privacy tool though Netspolitik's report published in 2020 states, its previous owners marketed it only as a tool to peek into celebrities' lives. After a bought of criticism its founder promised to overhaul the application limited to public searches. But neither the users see it as a tool for privacy nor its marketing content has hints for privacy and ethics.

Goboronidze though is sure his site doesn't not support privacy violation, particularly for children, he seems to have no clue on how child abuse could be a prevented. He said he had consultations with Thorn, an organization that works for child abuse prevention, for inputs. Talking to Interceptor he said, "We do not want to be a monster machine". He further added, subscribing to its website requires an ID proof to ask PimEyes to perform take down notices on behalf of children. He said, it is only designed to match photos irrespective of gender, age, race or ethnicity. While they systematically target individuals who look for children's pictures, it is a challenge for their engineers to prevent search results pertaining to children.

Under US law, it can be held responsible for violating children's privacy for holding back their information. Though Goboronidze bluntly denies it stores their information, their privacy policy speaks otherwise – it states free account users' information including fingerprint of a face is retained for 48 hours and the data from the photos indexed in results would be stored for 2 years. A network traffic analysis by The Interceptor showed that the data was stored under the subdomain named "collectors". As per Intercept's report Gobronidze expressed his surprise towards existence of such subdomain and said the team is working on the issue, the only immediate way out seems is to give the website a sleeping pill to absolve it of its insomniac searching traits.

When The Intercept tried to search for fake faces, they ended up with images from a wide range of sources. Earlier too it was under thick controversy for sourcing pictures from social media platforms. This time a huge swath of pictures came from sources including shelter homes, charity institutes, and personal websites, parents who openly and anonymously posted their children's pictures. In 2020, in an article published by Jane Wakefield, in BBC, he quotes Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch," To see this powerful surveillance tech marketed to individuals is chilling. It's ripe for stalking and puts women and children at unprecedented risk." PimEyes was initially developed by two Polish developers in 2017. And after passing over different hands it finally landed with Georgian international relations scholar, Giorgi Gobronidze, at a lecture meeting in Poland, where he met the site's creators. The company promoted it as an online privacy tool though Netspolitik's report published in 2020 states, that its previous owners marketed it only as a tool to peek into celebrities' lives. After a bought of criticism its founder promised to overhaul the application limited to public searches. But neither the users see it as a tool for privacy, not its marketing content has hints for privacy and ethics.

Goboronidze though is sure his site doesn't support privacy violations, particularly for children, he seems to have no clue on how child abuse could be prevented. He said he had consultations with Thorn, an organization that works for child abuse prevention, for input. Talking to Interceptor he said, "We do not want to be a monster machine". He further added, that subscribing to its website requires an ID proof to ask PimEyes to perform take-down notices on behalf of children. He said it is only designed to match photos irrespective of gender, age, race, or ethnicity. While they systematically target individuals who look for children's pictures, it is a challenge for their engineers to remove children from the search.

Under US law, it can be held responsible for violating children's privacy by holding back their information. Though Goboronidze bluntly denies it stores its information, its privacy policy speaks otherwise – it states the information of free account users including fingerprint of a face for 48 hours and the data from the photos indexed in results would be stored for 2 years. A network traffic analysis by The Interceptor showed that the data was stored under the subdomain named "collectors". As per Intercept's report, Gobronidze mentioned his surprise towards the existence of such a subdomain and said the team is working on the issue, the only immediate way out seems to give the website a sleeping pill to absolve it of its insomniac searching traits.