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by throwaway78981 1712 days ago
Some might laugh this off as 'oh it's just scraping'. But I remember reading some comments in HN that there are apps that can scan faces and pull personal info including where they live, work etc. So each leak uncovers a person little by little.

This vindicates the stance taken by Signal to not even collect metadata.

Edit: I mean surreptitiously scan the face of a stranger you see in public and the app will tell you about them. Don't know names of the apps.

3 comments

> there are apps that can scan faces and pull personal info including where they live, work etc

Note that these services are also powered by scraping public data.

https://pimeyes.com does just that, I just posted it here on HN.
I always want to know what a service like that has found, but I'm also pretty unwilling to upload an image of me to it, given that there's not a lot of public images of me out there that I'm aware of. Then again, maybe if I did check I'd see a bunch of images where I was tagged by other people and that would disabuse me of the notion that images of me online are rare at all...