PimEyes, a public search engine that uses facial recognition to search for photos of people online, has banned searches for minors over fears it endangers children. technology/pimeyes-blocks-searches-childrens-faces.html”>reports The New York Times.
At least, ought. PimEyes’ new detection system, which uses age-detection ai to identify whether the person is a child, is still a work in progress. After trying it, The New York Times discovered that it is difficult for him to identify children photographed from certain angles. ai also doesn’t always accurately detect teenagers.
PimEyes CEO Giorgi Gobronidze says he had been planning to implement such a protection mechanism since 2021. However, the feature was only fully implemented after New York Times The writer Kashmir Hill published a article on the threat ai poses to children last week. According to Gobronidze, human rights organizations working to help minors can continue searching for them, while all other searches will produce images that obscure the children’s faces.
In the article, Hill writes that the service banned more than 200 accounts for inappropriate searches for children. One mother told Hill that she had even found photos of her children she had never seen before wearing PimEyes. To find out where the image came from, the mother would have to pay a monthly subscription fee of $29.99.
PimEyes is just one of the facial recognition engines that have been in the spotlight for privacy violations. In January 2020, Hill’s technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html?searchResultPosition=1″>New York Times investigation revealed how hundreds of law enforcement organizations had already begun using Clearview ai, a similar facial recognition engine, with little oversight.
“This is just another example of the big overall problem within technology, whether it’s surveillance-based or not,” said Daly Barnett, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. said The interception last year while criticizing PimEyes’ lack of safeguards for children at the time. “Privacy is not created from the beginning, and users have to choose not to have their privacy compromised.”