U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is demanding answers from the face recognition search engine PimEyes over its image recognition software being used to dox federal officers.
In September, Blackburn sent a letter to Giorgi Gobronidze, the owner and CEO of PimEyes, expressing her concern over the search engine’s artificial intelligence facial recognition technology reportedly being used by activists to identify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ names and photos.
In a follow-up letter last week, Blackburn said the search engine’s response to her initial letter “sidestepped” the issues she expressed in her initial letter.
Noting how the search engine claimed it is not violating data protection laws, Blackburn said PimEyes is placing “too little emphasis on ethical responsibility and too much on regulatory compliance.”
“As technology continues to outpace lawmaking, your overreliance on regulatory compliance is an insufficient defense…Current regulatory frameworks lack sufficient data protection, and mere compliance is not a strict enough threshold in comparison to the possible harms,” Blackburn wrote.
Blackburn stressed that facial recognition tools like PimEyes are inherently used to identify people, even if they don’t explicitly display names.
“Searching names alone can easily generate corresponding facial matches and searching faces alone can easily lead to names. Therefore, platforms like PimEyes are vital links in the chain of potential harm and are not vindicated by the absence of name identifiers. Even if the software is not technically assigning an identity during the search, there is certainly no debate that the process itself is used for the very purpose of identification,” the senator wrote.
Blackburn criticized PimEyes’ policy requiring users to use its facial recognition software only for “personal use,” stressing that simply telling users to behave ethically is not enough, as the company still bears responsibility for preventing misuse.
“This response shifts responsibility and accountability from the software itself to the users’ self-protection. In an age where fine print is small, an agreement to only self-search—if not met with clear enforcement—will result in meaningful consent surrendered and wrongful third-party abuse bypassed,” Blackburn said.
Blackburn concluded by demanding answers from PimEyes by Friday to multiple questions about the search engine’s policy and its efforts to protect the safety of law enforcement officers.
The Tennessee senator’s letter comes as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently announced that ICE agents are facing an 8,000 percent increase in death threats against them.
Earlier this year, Blackburn introduced the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, which would make releasing the names of federal law enforcement officers with the intent to obstruct a criminal investigation or immigration enforcement operations a federal crime, to address the rise in such threats.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
