During fifteen years on Facebook, he had befriended hundreds of women. The first person he hit out for was an almost stranger he met at a club while on vacation. They became Facebook friends and never had contact again. “It turned out that she had recorded porn at some point in her life,” he said. “She’s a brunette now, but in porn she was blonde.”
Then he found more: A friend had posted nude photos to a Reddit community called Gone Wild, a place meant to anonymously collect compliments about your body. There were topless photos of an acquaintance who had participated in the World Naked Bike Ride. A woman who signed up for a room he once rented out had naked selfies on a revenge porn website. The names of the women were not included in the photos. They had remained safely unknown until a search program came along that organized the Internet by face.
It can be extremely difficult to remove nude photos of yourself from the internet. Search engines like Google have free request forms to exclude them from a name search, but what about a face search? That was of course a service that PimEyes provided – for a price. The PimEyes “PROtect plan” started at about $80 per month. It was advertised as a way to find photos you weren’t aware of, with “dedicated support” to help remove them from the sites where they appeared, but one woman who tried to remove deplorable photos from the service called it professionalized sextortion .
Originally created in Poland by some ‘hacker’ types, PimEyes was purchased in 2021 for an undisclosed sum by a security studies professor based in Tbilisi, Georgia. The professor told me that he believed that facial recognition technology, now that it exists and is not going away, should be accessible to everyone. A ban on the technology would be as effective, he said, as America’s alcohol ban in the 1920s. Anyone who paid attention to a box you had to click before performing a search would see that you only have to search for your own face. According to the professor, visiting other people without their permission was contrary to European privacy legislation. Yet the site did not have technical controls in place to ensure that someone could only upload their own photo for a search.
Too many people on the internet currently don’t realize what is possible. People on OnlyFans, Ashley Madison, Seeking and other websites that cultivate anonymity hide their names but show their faces, unaware of the risk this entails. David wondered whether he should anonymously tell his friends that these photos were available and discoverable thanks to new technology, but he was afraid they would be smuggled out and it would do more harm than good.
He never uploaded his own face to PimEyes, as was the supposed purpose of the service, because he didn’t want to know what photos would appear. “Ignorance is bliss,” he said.
Of the book Your Face Is Ours: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill. Copyright © 2023 by Kashmir Hill. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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