Established | 2017 ![]() |
---|---|
Owners | Giorgi Gobronidze ![]() |
Employees | 12 (2023) ![]() |
PimEyes is a facial recognition search website that allows users to identify all images on the internet of a person given a sample image. The website is owned by EMEARobotics, a corporation based in Dubai. The owner and CEO of EMEARobotics and PimEye is Giorgi Gobronidze, who is based in Tbilisi, Georgia. [1] [ non-primary source needed ]
PimEyes was launched in 2017 by a Polish start-up owned by its creators, Polish software engineers Lucasz (also Lukasz) Kowalczyk and Denis Tatina. [2] [3] In 2017, Giorgi Gobronidze, a Georgian law academic, met the website's creators at a university in Poland. He said he used the website for academic research. [3]
In 2020, the PimEyes brand was purchased by the shell corporation Face Recognition Solutions Ltd, moving the website's headquarter from Poland to Seychelles, a popular tax haven. [3] [2] It was marketed as a cyberstalking tool to use on photos of celebrities. [4] [5]
In December 2021, Gobronidze said he purchased the website from an anonymous owner, using a shell corporation he registered in Dubai that same month. [4] [3] [2]
According to a lawsuit filed in Edwardsville, Illinois alleging violations of the Biometric Information Privacy Act, corporations legally linked to the PimEyes brand include Pimeyes Sp. Z O.O, Transaction Cloud, Inc., Carribex LTD., and Public Mirror SP. Z O.O. [6] Carribex LTD is based in Belize, and is used as the contact for questions about PimEyes' rules. [7]
PimEyes has been the subject of legal inquiries and lawsuits in Europe and the United States. In November 2022, the privacy advocacy group Big Brother Watch filed a complaint with the United Kingdom's data and privacy watchdog. [8]
In December 2022, Germany's privacy watchdog opened proceedings against PimEyes. [9] [10]
In May 2023, five plaintiffs filed a privacy lawsuit against PimEyes in Illinois. [6] [11]
The German news site netzpolitik.org has criticized PimEyes for its potential for abuse, [5] its moving location and queries by a German data security official, [12] the related service Public Mirror by the initial founders of Pimeyes, [13] its new owner and open questions by the German data security official. [14]
Students at Harvard University used PimEyes on Ray-Ban Meta to identify someone's name from a face and then performed a lookup on a people search sites with that name to identify personal information (including names, phone numbers and home address) in real time. [15] The software has been used by doxing social media accounts. [16]
PimEyes has been criticized for the ability for users to search for children and the return of potential explicit material containing children. In October 2023, PimEyes launched age-detection algorithms blocking the search of images of children. [17] [18] [2] [19] [20] [21]