Pimeyes is technically completely different from Clearview as a result of it doesn’t retailer faces in a database, however as a substitute searches the web for faces when a person uploads an image, in line with privateness consultants. The platform can be far more open; anybody can search the location without spending a dime, though to see the hyperlinks the place pictures are discovered, they need to pay a month-to-month price beginning at $36.

The firm’s CEO, a professor named Giorgi Gobronidze, additionally stresses that in contrast to Clearview, Pimeyes doesn’t crawl social media platforms, similar to Facebook, Twitter, or VKontakte (VK). “The fact that theoretically we can crawl social media does not mean that we should,” says Gobronidze, who purchased the platform on the finish of final yr. Instead Gobronidze says Pimeyes makes the web extra clear. “There are thousands of people who do not know their pictures are being used by different online sources,” he says. “And actually, they have a right to know.”

For individuals who don’t need to know, Gobronidze says it’s simple to take away their face from his website. “[People] can submit opt-out requests, or they can order a certain picture be removed and blocked from further processing with one click, under each free search result.” Even although Pimeyes is formally primarily based outdoors the EU, in Belize, the corporate ought to by no means have used his image within the first place, says Marx. “This company would only be allowed to use your biometric data with explicit consent.”

Pimeyes has incurred controversy earlier than. After a sequence of stories articles criticized its privateness insurance policies in 2020, its earlier house owners, entrepreneurs Łukasz Kowalczyk and Denis Tatina, determined to promote. But the 2 males didn’t disappear from the business. Instead, in line with firm data in Poland, they resurfaced as owners of a brand new face search engine known as Public Mirror that’s focused on the public relations business. One factor Pimeyes and Public Mirror have in frequent is Marx’s face.

In March of this yr, Marx discovered that Public Mirror had 4 photographs of his face in its information. Like different face search engines like google, it’s not solely the photographs themselves that reveal details about Marx, however the on-line hyperlinks that accompany them. Public Mirror’s hyperlinks act like a listing to the media articles which were written about Marx or the conferences the place he has spoken.

Each of those platforms reveals deeply private info. “You can tell where I study, which political party I like,” Marx says. Together, the photographs these corporations have collected of him level to an business that reveals vastly extra info than any social media profile.

When Marx began pulling on this thread again in 2020, all he wished was for one firm to cease accumulating photos of his face. Now it’s greater than that. Today, he’s calling for regulators to cease the business from accumulating photos of Europeans altogether. For that to occur, regulators should make an instance of Clearview. The query is, can they?