PimEyes is facing a legal complaint from a privacy rights group which alleges the facial recognition search engine is "unlawful".

Campaign organisation Big Brother Watch says that the website facilitates surveillance and stalking on a “scale previously unimaginable”.

According to the group, PimEyes searches images of billions of people, including children, and can be used to "harass and stalk" people.

The website lets anyone upload an image of a person to their website, which is then processed through facial recognition tech to find potential matches from an index of photos from the internet.

Madeleine Stone, legal and policy officer at Big Brother Watch, said that the use of facial recognition to identify people among potentially billions of photos is a threat to anonymity and called on the Information Commissioner to act to protect the public from “dangerous facial recognition tools”.

“Images of anyone, including children, can be scoured and tracked across the internet,” continued Stone. “This extraordinary power is available to anyone at the click of a button and could be secretly used by potential employers, university admissions officers, domestic abusers or stalkers.”

The complaint, which was sent via data law firm AWO, accuses PimEyes of unlawfully processing the biometric data of millions of UK citizens.

The move comes after Big Brother Watch filed a legal compliant about Southern Co-op's use of facial recognition. The civil rights organisation alleged that the use of biometric cameras is infringing the data rights of a significant number of the company's UK customers.

According to the privacy group, the chain uses invasive processing of personal data to create a biometric profile for every visitor to stores where cameras are installed.

It said that staff at Southern Co-op's stores can add customers to a facial recognition blacklist and make them a “subject of interest” for two years without them knowing.

National Technology News has approached PimEyes for comment.

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