Keep your face private: protect yourself from PimEyes and Clearview AI and other facial recognition services with these tips

Facial recognition technology companies are growing; it’s easier than ever for your face to be used to link you to your sensitive and personal information. Take steps to keep your face private!

Two Harvard students (AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio) recently figured out how to use AI glasses to reveal anyone’s personal details just by looking at them. They published their findings in this Google Doc, and many articles, like this one from Ars Technica, were written about this activity.

They paired smart Meta Ray Bans 2 with PimEyes. The glasses provided an image of the face. Then, they searched the face in PimEyes to get a name. Using the name, they searched data brokers to find other personal information about the person. They automated this and made it super fast with large language models (LLMs), creating a way to instantly identify anybody just by looking at them.

I originally posted a blog about protecting yourself from data brokers that trade in facial recognition, like PimEyes, in April 2023. If you were reading back then, hopefully, you took my advice. If not, it’s not too late. Keep reading to get advice on protecting yourself and preserving your privacy from these types of attacks.

Here’s how you can protect yourself

Three basic steps:

1. Opt out of facial recognition services like PimEyes, Clearview AI, and FaceCheck.ID (keep reading for how to do this).

2. Opt out of data brokers, so it’s harder to search by your name.

   Remove your private information from data brokers!

3. Use other identifiers, such as secondary phones, emails, and mailing addresses, to make it harder for data brokers to identify you.

Do you know how easily a bad actor can find your phone number? Make it A LOT harder by getting a secondary number and protect yourself from SIM Swaps and phone-based attacks

Make it harder for hackers to harm you by protecting your email address -- set up a secondary account and use that for account sign-ups

How to make your address harder to find on the internet

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