[vintermann]

The algorithms are public, the data is public... even today, you can often feed a portrait image to yandex's image search (the best public one out there) and get back pictures of the same exact person. It seems to have some special case for faces.

And it's by no means certain that you and I can't do better. I think the reason Yandex image search is better than google's, is that Yandex entered the game later and thus could incorporate better methods from the start. There have been important advances in extreme classification even in 2019.

I think the best we can hope for is that this power of identification isn't exclusive to governments and police, but can be used by us as well. So that there aren't more Bob Lamberts than necessary.