What happened

According to an extract published in WIRED of journalist Kashmir Hill's book Your Face Belongs to Us, someone called 'David' 'was able to upload screenshots of women whose pornography he had watched and get photos of them from elsewhere on the web, a trail that sometimes led him to their legal names.'

'You find them on Facebook and see their personal pictures or whatever and it makes it more exciting,' David told Hill. 'It’s like the secret identity of Batman or Superman. You’re not supposed to know who this person is, they didn’t want you to know, and somehow you found out.'

Why it happened

The crisis is driven by a lack of corporate accountability and the "wild west" nature of facial recognition transparency:

• Accessibility over ethics: Unlike Clearview AI, which is restricted to law enforcement, PimEyes is available to the general public. While the company’s Terms of Service prohibit searching for others, there is no technical mechanism to enforce this rule.

• Transparency raradox: PimEyes claims it is a privacy tool designed to help people find where their own photos appear. However, its business model thrives on indexing as much data as possible, including sensitive sites, without seeking consent from the subjects of those photos.

• "Whack-a-Mole" opt-outs: Accountability is limited because the "opt-out" process often requires users to submit their own biometric data to the company to be excluded, and even then, new images of the same person can reappear in subsequent crawls.