Pimeyes, a facial “search engine” could be used by stalkers

Privacy group Big Brother Watch filed a legal complaint against Pimeyes, a face recognition search engine. The group warn people that Pimeyes is a threat to privacy of millions of UK residents owing to its malicious operation of mining biometric data of millions of individuals in the UK.

Pimeyes allows anyone on the internet to upload a photo of a person’s face and find matches by mapping that image across a database of faces collected shared on photo-sharing sites, in blog posts and news articles, and on websites. The tool also returns URLs that can lead the user to the source website where the image was originally posted.

Madeline Stone, legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch says that by a stalker could find out a person’s “place of work, or indications of the area in which they live” by clicking on these links. “Images of anyone, including children, can be scoured and tracked across the internet,” she said, emphasizing on the dangerous implications of surveillance enabled by this tool.