PimEyes is a face-search engine. You upload one photo of a person’s face, and within seconds it finds other photos of that same person from across the public web — often enough to work out their name, their accounts, where they live, or where they work. It has scraped billions of faces, and anyone can use it.

If that sounds abstract, the documented cases are not.

It can identify almost anyone — from almost any photo

A New York Times reporter ran photos of a dozen colleagues through PimEyes. It found pictures of every single one — including images they had never seen, photos where they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, and shots where they only appeared in the background of a stranger’s photo: a music festival crowd, an art museum a decade earlier, a Greek airport in 2019. You do not have to be famous, or careless, to be in there.

It is used to stalk and harass

The UK privacy group Big Brother Watch filed a formal complaint calling PimEyes a tool for “surveillance and stalking on a scale previously unimaginable.” The core problem: anyone can upload a photo of anyone — an ex, a stranger on a train, a woman they saw in public — and find out who she is and where else she appears online.

It is used to target women specifically

Face search has become a tool for image-based abuse. It is used to de-anonymize women, connect their public photos to explicit material, and hunt for more — the kind of harassment that disproportionately hits women, trans people, and abuse survivors. One woman discovered an old photo she’d posted years earlier was being used to catfish strangers on adult forums, surfaced by exactly this kind of search.

Even Google thought it was too dangerous to release

Google built face-search technology like this years ago and chose not to release it because of how easily it could be abused. PimEyes released it to the public anyway. Five Illinois residents have sued the company under the state’s biometric privacy law for indexing them without consent.

Why removal is worth it

You can opt out of PimEyes yourself, for free — it just requires uploading your photo and a redacted ID, waiting weeks, and then repeating the process on the other engines that index you, like FaceCheck.ID. Most people never get around to it.

Opting out de-lists you from those engines, so a stranger with your photo can no longer use them to find the rest of your life. It won’t delete every copy of your face from the internet — nothing can — but it closes the easiest door.