He said they had explained how their search engine used neural net technology to map the features of a face, in order to match it to faces with similar measurements, and that the program was able to learn over time how to best determine a match. They agreed to speak with him about their creation, which eventually became PimEyes, for his academic research, Mr. They were “brilliant masterminds,” he said, but “absolute introverts” who were not interested in public attention. Gobronidze was in an exchange program, lecturing at a university in Poland, when one of his students introduced him, he said, to two “hacker” types - Lucasz Kowalczyk and Denis Tatina - who were working on a facial search engine. He began his career as a professor in 2014, eventually landing at European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, where he still teaches. Gobronidze got a master’s degree in international relations. The experiences inspired him to study the role of technological dominance in national security.Īfter stints working as a lawyer and serving in the Georgian Army, Mr. The country was effectively cut off from the world in 2008 when Russia invaded and the internet went down. His kindergarten was bombed during the civil war that ensued after Georgia declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Gobronidze grew up in the shadow of military conflict. “It’s stalkerware by design no matter what they say,” said Ella Jakubowska, a policy adviser at European Digital Rights, a privacy advocacy group. PimEyes has no controls in place to prevent users from searching for a face that is not their own, and suggests a user pay a hefty fee to keep damaging photos from an ill-considered night from following him or her forever. But he said he was relying on people to act “ethically,” offering little protection against the technology’s erosion of the long-held ability to stay anonymous in a crowd. PimEyes users are supposed to search only for their own faces or for the faces of people who have consented, Mr.
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