Yegor Tsvetkov’s project using photos of strangers on St Petersburg metro shows how easy it is to track people

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A Russian photographer has proved how easy it is to track down people on social media using facial recognition software.

Yegor Tsvetkov took photos of strangers on St Petersburg’s metro and used a facial recognition app which trawls through profiles on VKontakte, Russia’s biggest social network, to track down their online profiles.

Named “Your Face is Big Data”, the series of photographs shows how powerful facial recognition software has become, to the point that a complete stranger can find you at the click of a button.

Tsvetkov told the Guardian the project aimed to show technology can affect privacy, particularly if you don’t activate the relevant settings on your social media profiles.



“Nobody noticed that I photographed them, but I used a simple camera and I didn’t try to hide it,” he said.

“One girl in the project texted me after the publication and said that it was a bad feeling when she saw herself … but she fully understood my idea.”

He added that the project had highlighted the difference between the persona people present online and in real life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest FindFace.ru, which trawls through pictures on VKontakte to find profiles using facial recognition. Photograph: Screenshot/FindFace.ru

The software he used is called FindFace, and was developed by the Moscow-based company N-Tech.Lab.

Launched in February, the app trawls through millions of profiles on VKontakte to find the person you are looking for within seconds.

Tsvetkov showed just how well this software works. When the Guardian ran some of his photographs through the site, the profiles of most of his subjects were easy to locate.

The Guardian has not published any of these photos to protect people’s anonymity.

Facial recognition software has proved problematic for Facebook. In 2011, its commitment to privacy was questioned when it turned on facial recognition software to automatically identify people in photos. In Germany, it was threatened with legal action for violating privacy laws.

Currently, it is not possible to trawl through Facebook using facial recognition and, as of yet, there is no western equivalent of FindFace.