One day I was drinking coffee with my friend and he told me a story of how he got in trouble with his girlfriend because she found his old profile on a popular dating site match. Allegedly someone from their common friends bumped into it and sent her a friendly notification. He was unable to prove her that it’s just an old thing’ that he forgot to delete and their story ended there they broke up pretty fast after this incident. What are the odds of bumping into a profile of someone you know on a dating website and how easily such privacy could be violated if someone had a direct intention?

I remembered that there were some open-source face detection and recognition libraries available and thought that it’s probably possible to write a tool that would crawl photos on dating sites and try to recognize a particular person on them. Then I ran into face a platform that provides a RESTful API for detecting, tagging and recognizing faces on the pictures. (lebih…)