Concerns about children’s privacy have led PimEyes, the public face search engine, to ban searches for minors. Tbilisi, Georgia-based PimEyes CEO Giorgi Gobronidze said technical measures had been put in place to block such searches as part of a “do no harm policy.”
PimEyes, a subscription service that uses facial recognition technology to find online photos of a person, has a database of nearly three billion faces and enables about 118,000 searches per day, according to Gobronidze. The service is advertised as a way for people to search their own face to find unknown photos on the Internet, but there are no technical measures to ensure that users only search for themselves.
Parents have used PimEyes to find photos of their children on the Internet that they didn’t know about. But the service could also be used disastrously by a stranger. It had previously banned more than 200 accounts for inappropriate searches of children’s faces, Gobronidze said.
“Images of children can be used by individuals with twisted morals and values, such as pedophiles and child predators,” Gobronidze said. PimEyes will continue to allow registrations of minors’ faces by human rights organizations working on children’s rights issues, she added.
Gobronidze said blocking searches for children’s faces had been on “the roadmap” since he acquired the site in 2021, but the protection was not fully implemented until this month after the publication of a New York Times article about ai-based threats to children.
Still, the block is not airtight. PimEyes uses age detection ai to identify photos of minors. Gobronidze said it worked well with children under 14, but had “accuracy problems” with teenagers.
You may also not be able to identify children as such if they are not photographed from a certain angle. To test the blocking system, The Times uploaded a photo of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen from their days as child stars to PimEyes. The search for the twin who was looking directly at the camera was blocked, but the search for the other, who is photographed in profile, was successful. The search turned up dozens of other photos of the twin when he was a child, with links to where they appeared online.
Gobronidze said PimEyes was still perfecting its detection system.
Another public face search engine, FaceCheck.Id, does not appear to have technical restrictions on searches for children’s faces. The site did not respond to a request for comment.
Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in privacy, said there were bigger problems with face search engines on the Internet than with searches for children. The services are creating mechanisms to “hoover” people’s faces without their knowledge or consent and make them searchable, Solove said, calling it a “massive violation of privacy on a gigantic scale.”
