The shady Pimeyes 👀
A (somehow) complete thread 🧵
Pimeyes is a service that search photos thru a phenomenal database scrapped from the Internet, thanks to powerful facial recognition :
It was originally used to find yourself, but his popularity grew rapidly to be used for other purposes, as finding people during the Capitol insurrection :
vice.com/en/article/4ad…
Surprisingly, Pimeyes website highlight bad press while trying to discredit them (a bit awkwardly) :
1 - They have an affiliate program, a common way to encourage subscriptions
2 - While stating that you can submit DMCA requests to remove your face, you still need a paid subscription for monitoring :
Before going into controversies, let's track back the origins of Pimeyes ⬇️
From the @washingtonpost, two Polish individuals made the service since at least 2017 :
1 - WHOIS history shows that Lukasz Kowalczyk is the owner of the domain pimeyes.com, also revealing the contact email
2 - The late mobile app is signed by Denis Tatina
pimeyes@gmail.com has made two Google Maps reviews in Poland a few years ago, but no other traces are available (breach, accounts...)
As @_IntelligenceX showed, the company was originally registered as 'Pimeyes sp. z o.o.' in Poland, with another entity 'Face Api EU sp. z o.o.'
But in 2020-2021, Pimeyes moved to Seychelles (a known tax heaven) as "Face Recognition Solutions Ltd.", while also changing the WHOIS record for more privacy :
To finally land in Belize, another tax heaven, as 'Carribex LTD', coinciding with the arrival of a new owner...
...Giorgi Gobronidze bought Pimeyes for an undisclosed amount as he said to @netzpolitik_org
netzpolitik.org/2022/pimeyes-c…
G. Gobronidze is an academic, lecturer and researcher from Georgia, who also worked for the Ministry of Defense :
He also answered @alicehines questions from @VICENews latest video :
But what about the tech side of Pimeyes ?
Even if they mostly use Cloudflare, their infra seems to be hosted on AWS & Hetzner in Germany :
Protonmail is used for emails, and contact@pimeyes.com has been created the 2021-02-05 :
And here's the shady tech side :
❌no whitepaper
❌unclear TOS
❌ no communications with privacy watchdogs
A lot of misuse :
edition.cnn.com/2022/05/24/tec…
Pimeyes creates more questions than answers :
- How an individual could (and would) buy such a sensitive tech ?
- Who are the clients ?
- Why can't it be traced and audited clearly ?
- How's the data stored and shared ? Under which regulations ?
Pimeyes seems to play on a fine line, and the investigations of some states may shed light on its operation.
✍️
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