Friday, July 10, 2020

PimEyes knows what you did last summer

You might have come across news about a search engine for faces: https://pimeyes.com/en/ . You can upload your photo and it will tell you where in the interwebs it has seen you before. Of course, I had to try it. Here are my results:

OK, that was to be expected. This is the image I use whenever somebody asks me for a short bio with a picture or which I often use as avatar. This is also the first hit when you search for my name on Google Images. This is fine with me, this image is probably my pubic persona when it comes to the information super-highway. But still, if you meet me on the street, you can use PimEyes to figure out who I am. But that was to be expected. Then there come some variants of this picture and an older one that I used for similar purposes.

Next come pictures like these:

There seems to be an Armenian politician with some vague resemblance and the internet has a lot of pictures from him. Fine. I can hide behind him (pretty much like my wife whose name is so common in Germany that the mother of one of our daughter's classmates has the same when you only consider first and maiden name as well as a former federal minister).

But then there is this:

And yes, that's me. This is some open air concert one or two years ago. And it's not even full frontal like the sample I uploaded. And there probably 50 other people who are as much recognisable as myself in that picture. And even though this search engine seems not to know about them right now, there must be hundreds of pictures of similar Ali Mitgutsch Wimmelbuch quality that show at which mass activities I participated. I have to admit, I am a little bit scared.

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