FindFace closes for mere mortals

    The developers of the FindFace service, with which you can find people on VKontakte from a photograph, announced the termination of work on its public version and its phased shutdown from July 1.

    They tried to present the project to the public as an “innovative dating service for doubles of famous people” for 150 rubles a month, but it was used not only in “amorous affairs”, but also for example by users of “Dvach” to deanonymize and prosecute porn actresses and search for criminals as well and just participants in opposition rallies .

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    The Insider quotes Artem Kukharenko, founder of N-Tech.Lab, the firm behind FindFace:
    I am very glad that we managed to make a truly outstanding project, which for more than two years did not lose popularity and aroused interest not only in Russia but throughout the world. With the help of FindFace, people became acquainted, found old friends, missing people, and even delinquents. However, today the company's resources are focused on global projects in the field of security and retail. In this regard, we decided to complete the work on FindFace

    According to vc.ru , we are talking about "developing solutions for the state and business," but the details of this work are not disclosed. At the same time, this work can be judged by previous news reports.

    In September 2017, the Moscow Department of Information Technology introduced NtechLab's face recognition technology into the city’s video surveillance system to search for suspected crimes.

    The official website of the Moscow Mayor wrote then:
    During pilot trials with its help, more than 50 percent of lawbreakers who were sought using analytical algorithms were discovered and detained. Prior to this, some of them could not be found for many years.


    In March 2018, together with the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ryazan Region, the company introduced a mobile complex for face recognition at public events.

    In April 2018, company representatives distributed information about plans to implement a video analytics system based on face recognition in the shopping and entertainment center "Summer" in St. Petersburg.

    From the aforementioned, we can conclude that FindFace was, in fact, a public demo version of a more advanced system of face recognition and identification of people than just a search engine on public profiles of a social network. It seems that the task of the creators of FindFace algorithms to interest the special services and security companies around the world in their developments was crowned with success. Even Bloomberg wrote about the service with the headline "The Russian application that destroyed privacy forever .

    "Well, we again took a step closer to the Brave New World from the works of Huxley and Orwell.

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