'Too dangerous:' Why even Google was afraid to release this technology

An example of the photos surfaced by PimEyes when a photo of author Bobby Allyn was uploaded to the site. Some of the photos are easily found from a Google search. But even the person depicted in the photo didn't know some of these images existed online. (pimeyes.com)

Imagine strolling down a busy city street and snapping a photo of a stranger then uploading it into a search engine that almost instantaneously identifies the person.

This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s possible now, thanks to a website called PimEyes, considered one of the most powerful publicly available facial recognition tools online.

On TikTok, PimEyes has become a formidable tool for internet sleuths trying to identify strangers, with videos notching many millions of views showing how a combination of PimEyes, and other search tools, can, for example, figure out the name of a random cameraman at a Taylor Swift concert.