When I first heard of PimEyes I thought that maybe this had something to do with creator of Ant-Man. Some kind of enhanced eyesight for Scott Lang from Hank Pym. But then I realized that PimEyes is something else altogether. A super power, yes. But, one that we might have to worry about. For we may now have a face search engine at our disposal.
The New York Times explains:
“For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the proverbial needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet.
A search takes mere seconds. You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet. The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers.
PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search.
PimEyes found one reporter dancing at an art museum event a decade ago, and crying after being proposed to, a photo that she didn’t particularly like but that the photographer had decided to use to advertise his business on Yelp. A tech reporter’s younger self was spotted in an awkward crush of fans at the Coachella music festival in 2011. A foreign correspondent appeared in countless wedding photos, evidently the life of every party, and in the blurry background of a photo taken of someone else at a Greek airport in 2019. A journalist’s past life in a rock band was unearthed, as was another’s preferred summer camp getaway.
Unlike Clearview AI, a similar facial recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites.”
Like any new technology PimEyes could be used for benevolent and nefarious purposes ranging from finding photos of a loved one to use in a birthday party slideshow to stalking a porn actress so that you can track down their real identity. Anonymous Twitter trolls could now be outed as could criminals. But your employers could also find out about your past life while you find images of yourself that you never knew existed. It’s a potentially useful tool that could also wind up doing more harm than good. It all depends on how we’ll use it.
Would you use PimEyes?
Greatest. Idea. Ever. 
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