PimEyes - A Polish company just abolishes our anonymity

Research by netzpolitik.org shows the potential for abuse of PimEyes, a free search engine for 900 million faces. All of whom have photos on the Internet could already be part of their database.

Dylan smiles into the camera, arm in arm with the other guests of a queer boat party. Behind them, glasses glisten on the shelves of a bar. Eight years ago a party photographer uploaded this snapshot on the internet. Dylan had already forgotten it - until today. Because with a reverse search engine for faces, everyone can find this old party photo of Dylan. All they have to do is upload his profile picture from the Xing career network, free of charge and without registration. But Dylan wants to keep his private and professional life separate: During the day he works as a banker in Frankfurt am Main.

The name of the search engine is PimEyes. It analyses masses of faces on the Internet for individual characteristics and stores the biometric data. When Dylan tests the search engine with his profile picture, it compares it with the database and delivers similar faces as a result, shows a preview picture and the domain where the picture was found. Dylan was recognized even though, unlike today, he did not even have a beard then.

Our research shows: PimEyes is a wholesale attack on anonymity and possibly illegal. A snapshot may be enough to identify a stranger using PimEyes. The search engine does not directly provide the name of a person you are looking for. But if it finds matching faces, in many cases the displayed websites can be used to find out name, profession and much more.

👀 👉🏼 🇬🇧 PimEyes - A Polish company just abolishes our anonymity
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/pimeyes-face-search-company-is-abolishing-our-anonymity/

👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪: https://netzpolitik.org/2020/gesichter-suchmaschine-pimeyes-schafft-anonymitaet-ab/

👀 👉🏼 🇬🇧 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53007510

👀 👉🏼 🇬🇧 https://petapixel.com/2020/06/11/this-creepy-face-search-engine-scours-the-web-for-photos-of-anyone/

👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪 Automated face recognition -
Enforce our data protection rights at last!
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/automatisierte-gesichtserkennung-setzt-unsere-datenschutzrechte-endlich-auch-durch/

#PimEyes #facialrecognition #searchengine #privacy #anonymity #ourdata #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Brave goes after Google with privacy-first search engine

https://www.xda-developers.com/brave-search-engine-privacy-first/

https://brave.com/brave-search/

#searchengine #brave

DuckDuckGo has a crawler called DuckDuckBot. This crawler doesn’t impact the linked results displayed; it just grabs favicons and scrapes data for a few instant answers. DuckDuckGo’s help pages claim that the engine uses over 400 sources; my interpretation is that at least 398 sources don’t impact organic results. I don’t think DuckDuckGo is transparent enough about the fact that their organic results are proxied. Compare DuckDuckGo side-by-side with Bing and Yandex and you’ll see it’s sourcing organic results from one of them (probably Bing).

From here : https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.html#fnref:4

#DuckDuckGo #SearchEngine #web #scrapingWeb #Bot #WebCrawler

Stract is an open source search engine where the user has the ability to see exactly what is going on and customize almost everything about their search results. It's a search engine made for hackers and tinkerers just like ourselves. No more searches where some of the terms in the query arent used, and the engine tries to guess what you really meant. You get what you search for.

https://stract.com

https://github.com/StractOrg/stract

#Web #Search #SearchEngine
#FLOSS