The developers of the FindFace service, with the help of which it is possible to find VKontakte people from a photograph, have announced that they are ceasing work on its publicly available version and its phased disconnection since July 1.
The project tried to present to the public as an “innovative dating service with famous people’s twins” for 150 rubles a month, but it was used not only in “love affairs”, but also, for example,
“Dvach” users for deanonymization and persecution of pornographic actresses and search for both
criminals and and simply participants of
opposition rallies .
The Insider
quotes Artem Kukharenko, founder of N-Tech.Lab, the firm behind FindFace development:
I am very pleased that we have managed to make a truly outstanding project that has not lost its popularity for more than two years and has attracted interest not only in Russia, but throughout the world. With the help of FindFace, people got acquainted, found old friends, missing people and even offenders. However, today the company's resources are focused on global security and retail projects. In this regard, we have decided to complete the work on FindFace
According to
vc.ru , this is 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 Department of Information Technologies of Moscow introduced the face recognition technology from NtechLab into the city video surveillance system to search for suspects in crimes.
The official website of the Mayor of Moscow wrote then:
During the pilot tests, with its help, more than 50 percent of lawbreakers were found and detained using analytical algorithms. Before that, 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 presented a mobile complex for face recognition at public events.
In April 2018, company representatives disseminated information about plans to introduce a video analytics system based on face recognition at the Leto shopping and entertainment center in St. Petersburg.
From the above, 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 the social network. It seems that the task of the creators of the algorithms of FindFace to interest the special services and security companies of the whole world in their developments has been crowned with success. Even Bloomberg wrote about the service with the heading "
Russian application that has destroyed privacy forever ."
Well, we again became one step closer to the “Brave New World” from the works of Huxley and Orwell.