Its home screen gives little indication that it’s intended for people to search only for themselves. While it positions itself as a privacy tool, there are few barriers stopping PimEyes users from searching any face. The European Convention of Human Rights has ruled that pictures of dead people can have a privacy interest for the living, according to Lilian Edwards, professor of law, innovation, and society at Newcastle University in the UK, who says that using photos of the living mined from the web without consent can also be a potential violation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which prohibits the processing of biometric data to identify people without their consent. If it’s a person who has died we have to figure out who has rights over it.” “Just because the data doesn’t belong to a person anymore does not automatically mean you are allowed to take it. The dead aren’t generally protected under privacy laws, but processing their image and data isn’t automatically fair game, says Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute.

“There’s something very grim, especially about the obituary ones.” “They are clearly crawling all sorts of random websites,” says Daniel Leufer, a senior policy analyst at digital rights group Access Now. (Gobronidze, who took over PimEyes in January 2022, says that this criticism predates his tenure at PimEyes, and that the company’s policies have since changed.) The company, which has trawled social media for images but now says it scrapes only publicly available sources, has been criticized for collecting images of children and accused of facilitating stalking and abuse. The company charges users $20 to find the websites where their photos have been found, upwards of $30 a month for multiple searches, and $80 to exclude specific photos from future search results. PimEyes positions itself as a tool for people to monitor their online presence. Users can decide what is private or public on their profiles, which are searchable in Ancestry’s member directory. Living people aren’t viewable in family trees unless tree creators authorize specific accounts to see them. Whenever a user makes a family tree public on the site, deceased people’s photos can be seen by any registered user. Users can access these records to make family trees. The images seemed to come from her digital memorial, Ancestry, and Find a Grave, a cemetery directory owned by Ancestry.Īncestry’s database is the largest in the increasingly expanding genealogy industry, with more than 30 billion records-including photos and documents from public records-covering 20 million people. They included a black-and-white photo of her great-great-great-grandmother from the 1800s, and a picture of Scarlett’s own sister, who died at age 30 in 2018. Searching deeper, Scarlett found other images of her relatives, also apparently sourced from the site. It came up with a picture of her own mother, as an infant, in the arms of her grandparents-taken, she thought, from an old family photo that her mother had posted on Ancestry. As an experiment, she searched for a grayscale version of one of her own baby photos. In January, she noticed that PimEyes was returning pictures of children that looked like they came from URLs. Since then, she’s been monitoring the site to make sure the images don’t return. She attempted to get the pictures removed from the platform, which uses images scraped from the internet to create biometric “faceprints” of individuals. In February 2022, the facial recognition search engine PimEyes surfaced non-consensual explicit photos of her at age 19, reigniting decades-old trauma. “I didn’t even know who my mum’s paternal grandparents were.”Ī isn’t the only site that Scarlett checks regularly. “There’s a lot of stuff in my family that’s weird and strange that we wouldn’t know without Ancestry,” says Scarlett, a software engineer and writer based in Kirkland, Washington. Finding out Taylor Swift was her 11th cousin twice-removed wasn’t even the most shocking discovery Cher Scarlett made while exploring her family history.

Face search person by photo