Face-tracking harvesters grab one picture of you and then use AI to find every other digital picture of you on the web. They open every social media post, resume, news clipping, dating account etc. and sell the full dossier on you to Axciom, the NSA, Political manipulators etc. and hack your bank accounts and credit cards. Never put an unsecured photo of yourself online. Anybody can take a screen grab of your photo on here, put it in Google’s or Palantir’s reverse image search, find all your other images and social media accounts online and get into your bank account or medical records in 30 minutes. The fact of the internet’s failed security is in the headlines every day. The danger of posting pictures on the web is pretty clearly covered in every major newspaper. Fusion GPS, Black Cube and political operatives harvest every photo on here every hour and use the data to spy on people for political dirty tricks. The FBI, CIA, NSA and most 3-letter law enforcement spy operations copy everything on this site and analyze it. Don’t you wonder why you never see anybody famous, political, in public service or in law on a dating site? Read Edward Snowden’s book ‘Permanent Record’ or any weekly report at Krebs On Security. Huge numbers of the profiles on here are fake Nigerian scammer type things. 2D pictures have no bearing on 3D experiences of people in person. I am only interested in meeting people in person. Nobody has ever been killed at a Starbucks! There is nothing unsafe about meeting at a highly public Starbucks or Peets. I learned my lessons. There are hundreds of thousands of bait profiles on here. The real people show up for the coffee. The fake ones in Nigeria, and the political spies never show up in person and have a million carefully prepared excuses why not.

For example: Yandex is by far the best reverse image search engine, with a scary-powerful ability to recognize faces, landscapes, and objects. This Russian site draws heavily upon user-generated content, such as tourist review sites (e.g. FourSquare and TripAdvisor) and social networks (e.g. dating sites), for remarkably accurate results with facial and landscape recognition queries. To use Yandex, go to images.yandex.com, then choose the camera icon on the right. From there, you can either upload a saved image or type in the URL of one hosted online.

If you get stuck with the Russian user interface, look out for Выберите файл (Choose file), Введите адрес картинки (Enter image address), and Найти (Search). After searching, look out for Похожие картинки (Similar images), and Ещё похожие (More similar). The facial recognition algorithms used by Yandex are shockingly good. Not only will Yandex look for photographs that look similar to the one that has a face in it, but it will also look for other photographs of the same person (determined through matching facial similarities) with completely different lighting, background colors, and positions. Google and Bing also look for other photographs showing a person with similar clothes and general facial features, Yandex will search for those matches, and also other photographs of a facial match.

Any stranger could snap your picture on the sidewalk or on Match.com then use an app to quickly discover your name, address and other details? A startup called Clearview AI has made that possible, and its app is currently being used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the US, including the FBI, says a report in The New York Times.

The app, says the Times, works by comparing a photo to a database of more than 3 billion pictures that Clearview says it’s scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared. A name might easily be unearthed, and from there other info could be dug up online.

The size of the Clearview database dwarfs others in use by law enforcement. The FBI’s own database, which taps passport and driver’s license photos, is one of the largest, with over 641 million images of US citizens.

Political spies have even better programs than this do…watch out! The web is not safe!