Have you ever seen a stranger out in public and wondered who is that person? There’s an app for that.
FindFace is a controversial, free people search app that can accurately find a person 70 percent of the time. The FindFace app works in realtime and uses facial recognition technology to search for people in public using just a photo to find their full names and social media profiles online.
FindFace is the brainchild of two young Russian software developers, Alexander Kabakov, 29, and Artem Kukharenko, 26.
The creators of FindFace claim that this new people finder app will revolutionize online dating as we know it by letting people solicit dates with strangers that they find attractive. They also say that FindFace’s people identification software could be used by police to find criminals.
FindFace has reportedly already been used by Russian police departments to solve crimes by uploading images of suspected criminals on the app. Unfortunately, FindFace also has dangerous stalker potential.
According to FindFace’s co-creator, Alexander Kabakov, the app could be used to find the identity of a person you are interested in, and then send that person a friend request online. FindFace can also search for and find people who have similar looks. For instance, you can upload a photo of a celebrity or person that you know and FindFace will return search results that show social media profiles for any people who look similar to the person that you searched for.
FindFace can reportedly identify people in public around 70 percent of the time, as long as you take a picture of the person and that person has an online social media profile that can be searched.
However, FindFace has serious limitations. The FindFace people search only works in Russia and some Eastern European countries. The site pulls its search results from a large social media site called VK that is popular in that part of the world. Unfortunately, the FindFace people finder does not currently work with Facebook profiles. This is a big problem since Facebook is the largest social network in the history of the world.
Since its launch at the beginning of 2016, FindFace has been downloaded by over 500,000 people, and users have used the app to search for over 3 million people.
The Russian software company Kaspersky tested out FindFace on their office workers and gave the search app a positive review. Kaspersky claims that FindFace was able to find 9 out of 10 randomly chosen Kaspersky employees online.
However, FindFace gets a large number of poor reviews from users. The Android version currently has an average rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars on the Google Play site and the Apple iOS version only gets a 2 out of 5 star rating on Apple’s iTunes Store.
Obviously, FindFace has a long way to go before it becomes a major worldwide facial recognition and people search app that is used regularly by the general public.
There are already a large number of free people search sites online, where you can find a person by name, address, phone number, email etc. However, these sites only work with people that you already have some information on. As photo and face recognition technology moves forward, it will definitely raise the bar on how people search for each other online, especially complete strangers out in public places.
As facial recognition and people identification apps like FindFace get better, they will definitely disrupt anonymity as we know it.