Image Recognition
“I didn’t even know who my mum’s paternal grandparents were.”Ancestry.com isn’t the only site that Scarlett checks regularly. In February 2022, the facial recognition search engine PimEyes surfaced non-consensual explicit photos of her at age 19, reigniting decades-old trauma. PimEyes, Scarlett says, has scraped images of the dead to populate its database. Whenever a user makes a family tree public on the site, deceased people’s photos can be seen by any registered user. Living people aren’t viewable in family trees unless tree creators authorize specific accounts to see them.