Show HN: A People Search Engine with Face Recognition

26 pointsposted 2 days ago
by vignesh_warar
(introthem.com)

34 Comments

cosmotic

2 days ago

Using biometric data without permission may be illegal. Facebook was sued in Illinois over this.

sfmz

2 days ago

I think you need a FAQ.

In the FAQ you could explain how its not going to be a useful tool for stalkers because that's where my mind goes, maybe I watch too many DateLines.

vignesh_warar

2 days ago

Thank you!

Exactly - this won't be useful for stalkers. We don't crawl or index social media pictures.

Will add FAQ section.

dgfitz

2 days ago

> The Problem: Researching individuals - whether for hiring or personalizing outreach

So you're helping people profile others based on how they look? Aren't we trying to move away from that?

clueless

2 days ago

doesn't seem to be doing that. It's essentially a glorified google reverse image where the input is a face, then it probably uses the metadata gleaned from that search to look up further info for that person. Will it be accurate? we will have to see

pimlottc

a day ago

“Researching individuals for personalized outreach” is the creepiest sentence I’ve read this month

vignesh_warar

2 days ago

No, we don't. I think my copy might have been confusing. We are simply Perplexity for people - we just summarize a person's internet presence.

matteason

2 days ago

How much have you investigated the legality of this? In the EU biometric data is 'special category data' under the GDPR [0] and can only be processed in very limited circumstances unless you have the consent of the data subject [1]

[0] https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/organisations/know-your-obl...

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/

vignesh_warar

2 days ago

Thanks for the info. We don't use any private data, only publicly available images. So it won't be a problem, in my opinion.

I will contact my lawyer and double check this.

1659447091

2 days ago

Not only the EU, but you will have to check with each of the 50 US states as they all have a patchwork of laws. Illinois was one of the first, but I don't know much about it; I thought I read it was pretty extensive to the point some facial recognition companies specifically exclude it. Texas also has its own version as well, that I know of; again don't know details.

matteason

2 days ago

You might want to look up Clearview AI, who also took publicly available images, performed biometric recognition on them and ended up with a €30.5 million fine: https://blog.barracuda.com/2024/10/23/clearview-ai-fine-gdpr...

vignesh_warar

2 days ago

I just did research on this.

Clearview vs Introthem:

- Clearview does photo-to-photo matching. We don't do that, and I don't think I will ever build that.

- You have to provide the name, then we build the faces collection for analyzing at search time and delete it.

- We don't retain any face collection once the search is done.

I still don't know if I am breaking any laws, but here is how Introthem works.

mathgeek

2 days ago

You should definitely find out if you are breaking any laws.

josefritzishere

2 days ago

100% this is illegal in Illinois. They have specific biometric data protections. Probably also a crime elsewhere.

knxnts

2 days ago

yes. and there will be more state laws in the future. seems like it would raise some FCRA concerns to me.

wongarsu

2 days ago

The GDPR works on the personally-identifiable vs anonymous distinction. Private vs public doesn't really factor into it, or at least only becomes relevant in the nuances.

Personally identifiable data is just a mouthful, which is why people like to misleadingly shorten it to private data.

popalchemist

2 days ago

Though novel, this is pretty unethical.

vignesh_warar

a day ago

Thank you for the feedback, everyone.

I am temporarily pausing and making sure I am within legal limits. If not, I will completely remove face recognition and try other routes to solve the problem.

Vignesh

dankwizard

2 days ago

Oh man if this gets popular - you're gone. Open and shut case.

georgehill

2 days ago

Pretty solid product but you definitely need to check your face recognition feature, whether it complies with laws.

josefritzishere

2 days ago

This product is moderately terrifying. I hope it's illegal to be honest.

bottom999mottob

2 days ago

So I tried to search myself just to see how terrible/awesome this product is. On attempting to use the free plan:

Error: Failed to subscribe to the plan. You ran out of credits. Please upgrade your Plan

Dark pattern, lack of testing, or incompetence? Please do better if you're contributing to the Orwellian surveillance capitalist state

vignesh_warar

2 days ago

Thank you for trying. We are being rate-limited. We are currently fixing it.

Edit:

Fixed!

connor11528

2 days ago

how are you harvesting all this data?

vignesh_warar

2 days ago

It's just the Bing search API under the hood. The process is: Query -> Crawl -> Categorize profiles.

rashidae

2 days ago

This is such a cool angle for lead gen. Just the other day, I saw some kids using those Ray-Ban/Meta glasses through Instagram Live feeds to grab publicly available data from people almost in real time. It blew my mind.

Sure, this kind of tech will probably go through a lot of scrutiny and for good reason, but whether it’s a consumer product or a custom internal tool, it’s happening.

Excited to see where this goes.