A Polish facial recognition website called PimEyes has been described as a “stalkers dream” by critics, who have accused the platform of enabling harassment and promoting “doxxing”. Launched in 2017, PimEyes allows users to trawl the internet for images containing their face. The firm argues that it enables people to protect themselves from identity theft and image theft by finding photos of them being used without their consent, and has been subject to inquiries in the US and the UK, but not found to have breached privacy law. However, the German authorities fined the firm under GDPR late last year, citing the “massive endangerment of the rights and freedoms of citizens” and a “lack of data protection compliance”. The firm came under fire last month when it was revealed that its “crawler” teams had been scraping images of dead people from Ancestry.com to build up its database.

The platform is similar to Google’s reverse image search tool but uses AI image recognition to speed up the process. The director of PimEyes, Giorgi Gobronidze, said that inquiries by UK and US authorities had found no privacy violations, and asked why “vigilant activists” were attempting to damage the firm’s reputation. However, others have accused PimEyes of promoting harassment and “doxxing”. Cher Scarlett, a software engineer and former Apple developer, wrote on Twitter that the platform was “a privacy and security mess”, claiming that it had helped promote doxxing requests, and that someone had used it to blackmail her. She called PimEyes a “stalker’s dream”. Meanwhile, Kristen Ruby, a Twitter influencer, praised the platform as one of the best tools available for identifying people who have used her image without her consent.

The controversy surrounding PimEyes has seen it described as both “disturbing but extremely valuable” and “creepy”. In the UK in a House of Lords debate on CCTV and surveillance, Lord Strathcarron described AI search engines such as PimEyes as having the potential to track anyone at any time, and being capable of altering our concept of privacy. In response to the criticism, Gobronidze has maintained that PimEyes is not designed to establish the identity or details of any individual, but to help people find images of themselves on “publicly accessible websites”.

The platform’s critics have called for tighter regulation of facial recognition technology, particularly in the context of surveillance and privacy. Some have argued that it is the responsibility of tech companies to ensure that their products do not facilitate harassment or abuse, while others have said that PimEyes is just one example of a wider issue of privacy violations and online harassment that requires a concerted effort to address. For its part, PimEyes says that it is committed to protecting privacy and helping users to safeguard their personal information.