Laying Bare

This story about how our faces can be used to identify us is alarming for those in professions who do not want people in their real life know their professional identity. Then there is the rest of us who have reasons for seeking anonymity in public places for any number of reasons. All of us are included in the frames of pictures others are taking - just because we were around their subject and did not duck out fast enough. The story also underscore how painfully out of touch and out of pace government regulators are:

Originally created in Poland by a couple of “hacker” types, PimEyes was purchased in 2021 for an undisclosed amount by a professor of security studies based in Tbilisi, Georgia. The professor told me that he believed facial recognition technology, now that it exists and is not going away, should be accessible to everyone. A ban on the technology would be as effective, he said, as the US prohibition on alcohol had been in the 1920s. Those who paid attention to a box you had to click before performing a search would see that you are only supposed to search for your own face. Looking up other people without their consent, the professor said, was a violation of European privacy laws. Yet the site had no technical controls in place to ensure a person could only upload their own photo for a search.

There is all kind of vigilance and regime of fines for those who are in violation of GDPR consent and yet outing a porn actor based on the picture of her face does not rise up to level of privacy violation. By the time they write up their regulation on the topic, the world would have moved to other things more far insidious.