David had an addiction. Ever since he was a kid, he had spent countless hours of his life on the internet searching for naked photos of women and videos of them having sex. He wasn’t happy about how much time he spent looking for online pornography, but he couldn’t stop.
At some point, he began to want more. He wanted to know who the women really were, to dig beyond their pseudonyms, find out their actual names, and see what they were like in real life. He heard about a tool to do that on a porn discussion board called FreeOnes. Someone had shared a photo of a porn actress, out of character, clothed and smiling, in a news article. Asked how he had found it, the person posted a link to PimEyes, a free facial recognition site.
David, who is in his thirties, checked out PimEyes. It was pretty basic. The landing page said “Face Search” in bold white letters, with an invitation to “upload photos of one person.” PimEyes claimed to have hundreds of millions of faces from 150 million websites. All he had to do was upload a screenshot of a woman and the site would return photos of people it deemed most similar to her. “We do not save your search images,” the site promised, adding with painful irony, “Online privacy is very important for us.”
The PimEyes face search tool worked. David was able to upload screenshots of women whose pornography he had watched and get photos of them from elsewhere on the web, a trail that sometimes led him to their legal names. From there, he could know where they lived and find them in the real world, a scary possibility if he had the desire to hurt or assault them. But that was not the appeal for him. Unmasking them was all he sought to do.
“You find them on Facebook and see their personal pictures or whatever and it makes it more exciting,” David said. “It’s like the secret identity of Batman or Superman. You’re not supposed to know who this person is, they didn’t want you to know, and somehow you found out.”
The women keep their identities secret for a reason. Polite society doesn’t tend to approve of their line of work. In 2014, a freshman at Duke University was revealed by a classmate to be a porn actress named Belle Knox. When people found out that the student was paying her $60,000 tuition by having sex on film, she was shunned on campus and harassed online. “I was called a ‘slut who needs to learn the consequences of her actions,’ a ‘huge fucking whore,’ and, perhaps the most offensive, ‘a little girl who does not understand her actions,’” she wrote at the time.
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