A startup called PimEyes allows anyone to identify a stranger within seconds with just a photo of the person’s face. The technology has alarmed privacy advocates worldwide.

  • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Permanently erase unwanted photos from external websites. Eliminate the problem of illegal usage of your image.

    LOL…ok there…

    Upload photo and find out where images are published upload bar arrow

    Or you can take a photo with the device’s camera. Don’t worry, we will not store it!

    LOL, won’t store shit my ass

  • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
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    Consider the consequences, says journalist Kashmir Hill, of everyone deciding to use this technology at all times in public places.

    “Something happens on the train, you bump into someone, or you’re wearing something embarrassing, somebody could just take your photo, and find out who you are and maybe tweet about you, or call you out by name, or write nasty things about you online,” said Hill

    In an interview with NPR, he said the abuse of the tool has been overstated, noting that the site’s detection tools intercepted just a few hundreds instances of people misusing the service for things like stalking

    Y’all are angling for a gold medal at the understatement olympics.

    There are potential uses of the technology that could be beneficial. For instance, for people who are blind, or for quickly identifying someone whose name you forgot and, as the company highlights, keeping tabs on one’s own images on the web.

    He continued: “PimEyes can be used for many legitimate purposes, like to protect yourself from scams,” he said. “Or to figure out if you or a family member has been targeted by identity thieves.”

    OH, COME ON

    I love how they really have to dig to even come up with some legitimate ways to use the technology.

    • Hotdogman@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Like that wouldnt be more awkward.

      “Oh hey! Long time no see… -points cellphone at person’s face- …Tom!”

          • Steev@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            My glasses prescription means that I’m putting my glasses on at the start of the day and not randomly taking them off. I think they’d want them used like that, not randomly putting them on like reading glasses. But that would be pretty funny.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        There is no “adequate safeguards” in such technology. If it’s out there somehow, it will get abused if there’s a reason for it. That’s like a universal law. A product with such potential to be abused, will be abused, no matter what smart super solution for protection someone might come up with.

        Not to say it wouldn’t be a lifechanger for your gf or other people with a legitimate reason.

      • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I said this elsewhere, but I’ll say it here too. Your girlfriend should not have to adapt to society to feel less socially awkward. The world needs to be more accepting of people with issues like that. It shouldn’t be socially awkward. It should be okay for her to just say “Hey, sorry, I don’t recognize faces without context. Where do I know you from?”

        I had a friend years ago with aphasia and I would help them out when we’d meet by telling them what I’d be wearing and be on the look-out for them so I could walk up to them and they wouldn’t have to pick me out of a crowd. I’d also usually greet them with my name. They were really good at identifying voices usually, but the small effort was always appreciated, and it’s not that hard.

        Their aphasia also extended beyond faces, so they would often have problems finding their car if they didn’t park in the same place, so they would take a picture of the car and some landmark near by. They would show me the pictures so I could help them find it.

        What I’m saying is, is we as a society are going to be social to this great of a degree, where we interact with dozens of people, we need to learn to make it a place where everyone can also be involved as they are, not force them to conform to impossible standards for them.

      • Dirk Darkly@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        It would be less awkward to pull out a phone, take a picture of someone and pull up their info, adding their biometric data to some random company’s servers (possibly against their wishes) instead of just asking what their name is? Seems way less awkaward and more reasonable to just say she has facial ephasia than do all that.

    • Uprise42@artemis.camp
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      1 year ago

      To protect us from scams they made it easier than ever to set up a scam!

      Just plug your victims photo into this website and get every other photo they’ve ever posted!

    • Peaty@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Wait this is about Pimeyes? That’s used to figure out who you know has an OnlyFans account, right?

      • mo_ztt ✅@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Close. It’s about Pimeyes which is used to figure out the name and location of the Onlyfans girl you have a weird parasocial crush on. What’s the worst that could happen?

        (Technically, it only finds other photos on the internet of whatever random person you have a single photo of, which you can then often leverage into knowing their name and location.)

    • atetulo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      All this facial recognition stuff is going to do is normalize wearing masks and other head-coverings in public.

  • who8mydamnoreos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I have been adamant since 2006 that myself nor anyone else post pictures of my face or my children’s faces on social media for I knew this day would come eventually

    • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I know I’m old, but it was so violating when this first happened to me on facebook.

      Going to parties became less fun and more boring, when you had to start worrying what you’d look like when someone posted a picture of you without your consent.

        • Stache_
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          1 year ago

          Just wear a ski mask 24/7, problem solved. Bonus points in that you don’t have to use sunscreen!

          • girlfreddy@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Or, and just go with me here, wear a facemask like many do for COVID.

            Bonus points if you mess it up with a marker or have a psychedelic fabric one.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I proposed something like this for my graphic design thesis about 10+ years ago, though it was meant more as a warning against all the social media apps that were coming out at the time (foursquare, facebook, and others). People were posting pics of themselves all over and you could grab a ton of info just from a person’s picture. To prove my point I picked a random person based on a photo they posted and found as much info as I could. The pitch was that I would present it completely straight, as if it was a legitimate service, but I wanted it to come off creepy as fuck, as a sort of warning against the out-of-control posting that people were doing. It was going to be a sort of “dating” service where you could take a picture of somebody and instantly get all the information available on the internet about them, more a stalking app than anything, but same basic idea as this. Apparently I should’ve started up my own company.

  • sramder@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    ‘To dangerous:’ Why even Google was afraid to release this technology publicly.

    There. I fixed it ;-)

    • ???@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      The US military has, in all likelihood, been already capable of this for the past 15-30 years. Google has no market other than the public, and there’s no way to stop it from tagging rich people as “that asshole who owns what used to be twitter” but also the general public (us) would just end up flagging people we hate or envy or who we want revenge on to ruin people’s reputations.

      There is no upside for a tech like that in the hands of big money, not even for big money; done the way Google would do it, it would fracture society like nothing before it and that includes utterly destroying the economy before leading to some sort of nuclear exchange.

      • sramder@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So the PimEyes subscription fee… is the only thing preventing global thermal nuclear war?

        Seems as plausible as anything these days ;-)

      • GlendatheGayWitch@lib.lgbt
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        1 year ago

        This technology has been in place in public spaces like airports for at least a decade. They claimed it was to fight terrorism by scanning and collecting models of everyone’s face looking for known terrorists. They said that they could identify the terrorists because even with a disguise, you can’t alter the shape of your facial bone structure.

  • _number8_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    is there any positive use case for this? either you recognize them organically or you don’t need to be knowing them

    • SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Maybe people with a brain injury/Alzheimer’s/face blindness/memory problems, if the tech could be integrated with glasses and make real time identifications of people you’ve met previously? But that’s a stretch. Bad people will use it to do bad things long before any good comes of it.

      • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        This, basically.

        I have lots of trouble remembering people’s names. I’m usually good at recognising faces, but my brain doesn’t link the face to the rest of the person’s information. Glasses that could tell me someone’s name and maybe a few key facts would make a huge difference in my life.

    • Not_mikey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You can use it on yourself to see what pictures are out there of you, and get notified if something new is posted that you may not know about without your consent. Don’t see many legitimate reasons to use it on other people, but if it had some sort of identity verification so that only you could look up yourself I think it could be very useful.

    • treadful@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Why is this negative compared to “organic” recognition?

      I get not wanting to be in big centralized databases, but digital recognition of a feature you show publicly doesn’t seem so nefarious to me.

      • brianorca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Being able to compare someone’s face to your own database is one thing. Being able to look up a random person using the entire Internet as a database is a stalker’s utopia.

  • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Being able to purge unwanted use of your image and info is nice, and to a lesser extent so would being able to call up a nametag for people you’ve met before, because introvert name recollection is the great killer of our society

    • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Poor working memory is a huge ADHD trait. What the world needs is to drop the expectation of remembering names. ADHD, either as just a natural thing that the human brain does sometimes or as a result of other factors, is becoming an increasingly prevalent thing among a growing portion of the population. Yet the world is not built to accommodate people with it. Medication and therapy help, but the issues never really go away, and the solution in most cases shouldn’t be to “fix” those with ADHD to make them more “normal,” but to make the world into a place where they too can function. And this goes for anything neuro-divergent, obviously. We should get rid if the idea of making different people into “normal” people and instead make society a place where everyone can be accepted and function along side everyone else.

      Sorry, I ranted a bit there…