What’s actually making this possible is the PimEyes database. It’s insane that there is a facial recognition database that can be accessed like this. I doubt this is anywhere near legal in the EU.
The media keeps concentrating on Meta and the researchers but you can do the same with phone cameras, doorbell cameras, etc.
Yeah pimeyes absolutely needs to be shut down and laws need to be in place to protect private citizens from having their information sharable and searchable without their explicit consent. “Publicly available information” is always the line people use to defend these services. I’m arguing that our modern capabilities needs to be adjusted for. Things shouldn’t be so publicly accessable in the first place and personal data aggregation should be a much more vetted and potentially licensed business. Can we talk about what other purpose these facial recognition databases serve other than to stalk, expose, or extort people? If they required proof of identity and only allowed searches of your own face then I could understand the value.
I listened to the 404 Media podcast about this yesterday and the author argues that the subject of the article’s ire is intended to be the researchers themselves. Specifically, the bad ethics of testing this integration on non-consenting individuals (even though it was seemingly done with good intent).
Luckily the researchers realized what the fuck they had just made and pivoted the project to being about how to break the integration (ie: opt out of facial recognition systems and freeze your credit score).
Isn’t that why Google glass was cancelled
