"Exposing prostitutes": SearchFace led to mass harassment of girls on social networks

With the advent of the service SearchFace, which is an open analogue of FindFace and helps to find people by uploaded photos, many netizens have been subjected to cyberbullying. Especially, it affected girls who earn their living in the field of sex and communication on dating sites.

Dvacha users used the service to find the pages of actresses from porn films and various erotic videos, and then wrote to their relatives and friends. Many resorted to blackmail ... How this story ended, read in our material.

Like the previously thundered FindFace, the service SearchFace, having just appeared, managed to make a lot of noise on the Internet. The site works with facial recognition technology based on the uploaded image. The essence is extremely simple: you upload a photo, you get the results, where, most likely, there is a person depicted in the picture.

By creating this service, the SearchFace developers wanted to test all the search capabilities, but some users started using it for more selfish purposes.

So a thread appeared on the Dvach website, in which users conducted a "deanon of prostitutes". First, they took a screenshot of porn with the actress they were interested in, then using this picture and using the service SearchFace searched for a girl in social networks. However, they didn't even need to make any special efforts to do this, because SearchFace even gave out a link to a person's Vkontakte page.

But the "dvachers" had enough time to screen and surf the pages of some girls. Idle curiosity was not enough: if users managed to find actresses from the video category "18+", they began to blackmail them.

The forum even has instructions on how to act in such situations: First, anonymous people write to the "victims" themselves, then they send out screenshots or frames from the video to all her friends from social networks.

It all looks something like this:

According to the users themselves engaged in cyberbullying, their goal is "to notify the chosen ones of sh * * x about their double day." These are the "noble heroes" of our time.

Many anonymous people kept lists of friends of girls from social networks and wrote directly to them.

"Dvachery" threatened not only to expose, but also to deprive the parental rights of those girls who starred or continue to star in porn videos.

Some went further and began to present themselves as journalists of well-known Russian publications, for example, TJournal or Medusa.

In this screenshot, you can see how the editor of Medusa allegedly writes to the husband of one of the victims and sends a photo of his wife.

And here the "employee" of TJournal allegedly collects material for an article about workers in intimate spheres.

Then the same guy started writing to the girl's friends, attaching photo evidence to the message.

And these screenshots are not all examples of cyberbullying that girls working in the field of intimacy have been subjected to.

Many are outraged by such behavior of "dvachers", because "every person earns a living as he wants." The idea of exposure was supported mainly only by guys. But they did not have to rejoice for too long — on February 13, after threats from Vkontakte to file a lawsuit against SearchFace, the developers of the site have changed the way it works.

Now SearchFace no longer provides links to personal Vkontakte pages, but only shows some photos saved on them. Nevertheless, Internet users manage to find new victims in this way, and the usual "image search" helps them in this.