from Hacker News

Show HN: A People Search Engine with Face Recognition

by vignesh_warar on 11/20/24, 2:27 PM with 34 comments

Hey there HN!

I'm Vignesh, and I'm excited to launch Introthem.com — a people search engine that uses facial recognition to provide in-depth, accurate summaries of individuals, assist with HR screening, research prospects, and analyze brands.

The Problem: Researching individuals - whether for hiring or personalizing outreach - is a time-consuming challenge. While RAG-based search engines can help summarize someone's online presence, they have significant limitations. When multiple people share the same name, these engines often mix their information together, creating inaccurate profiles. Even worse, if someone shares a name with a celebrity or public figure, meaningful research becomes nearly impossible as the well-known person's results overshadow everything else.

The Solution: Introthem solves this using facial recognition to accurately classify and organize information by individual. Simply select the specific person you're interested in, and our engine will generate a comprehensive profile.

But that's not all – remember how we typically perform multiple queries to look up someone? For example, if a person founded a company, we then look up how that company is doing. Introthem handles this in-depth research automatically. It generates additional queries based on the first summary the engine produces – what I internally call Content-aware query generation. This helps you conduct thorough research about someone just by their name.

Try it now at https://introthem.com

Would love to hear your feedback, HN!

Demo:

Link 1: https://introthem.com/search?uuid=51d6bc6a-08ad-464e-b4f1-16...

Link 2: https://introthem.com/search?uuid=9f3ad850-1c72-4e8c-ad36-07...

Link 3: https://introthem.com/search?uuid=3f31072e-bf74-4ff2-b1ef-ee...

  • by cosmotic on 11/20/24, 6:17 PM

    Using biometric data without permission may be illegal. Facebook was sued in Illinois over this.

  • by sfmz on 11/20/24, 6:07 PM

    I think you need a FAQ.

    In the FAQ you could explain how its not going to be a useful tool for stalkers because that's where my mind goes, maybe I watch too many DateLines.

  • by dgfitz on 11/20/24, 5:45 PM

    > The Problem: Researching individuals - whether for hiring or personalizing outreach

    So you're helping people profile others based on how they look? Aren't we trying to move away from that?

  • by matteason on 11/20/24, 3:03 PM

    How much have you investigated the legality of this? In the EU biometric data is 'special category data' under the GDPR [0] and can only be processed in very limited circumstances unless you have the consent of the data subject [1]

    [0] https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/organisations/know-your-obl...

    [1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/

  • by popalchemist on 11/21/24, 12:43 AM

    Though novel, this is pretty unethical.

  • by josefritzishere on 11/20/24, 6:39 PM

    This product is moderately terrifying. I hope it's illegal to be honest.

  • by dankwizard on 11/20/24, 10:35 PM

    Oh man if this gets popular - you're gone. Open and shut case.

  • by vignesh_warar on 11/21/24, 10:40 AM

    Thank you for the feedback, everyone.

    I am temporarily pausing and making sure I am within legal limits. If not, I will completely remove face recognition and try other routes to solve the problem.

    Vignesh

  • by TudorAndrei on 11/22/24, 12:03 PM

    I have tried to use it, but as soon as I search for someone after log-in, it says that I ran out of credits.

  • by pogue on 11/21/24, 10:34 AM

    I tried the first link in the demo & it immediately just said I was out of credits. Brave Browser on Android.

  • by georgehill on 11/21/24, 1:34 AM

    Pretty solid product but you definitely need to check your face recognition feature, whether it complies with laws.

  • by NaolGBasaye on 11/22/24, 3:49 PM

    I tried signing up for the free version, but I keep getting an error toast.

  • by bottom999mottob on 11/20/24, 8:56 PM

    So I tried to search myself just to see how terrible/awesome this product is. On attempting to use the free plan:

    Error: Failed to subscribe to the plan. You ran out of credits. Please upgrade your Plan

    Dark pattern, lack of testing, or incompetence? Please do better if you're contributing to the Orwellian surveillance capitalist state

  • by connor11528 on 11/20/24, 9:32 PM

    how are you harvesting all this data?

  • by rashidae on 11/20/24, 5:50 PM

    This is such a cool angle for lead gen. Just the other day, I saw some kids using those Ray-Ban/Meta glasses through Instagram Live feeds to grab publicly available data from people almost in real time. It blew my mind.

    Sure, this kind of tech will probably go through a lot of scrutiny and for good reason, but whether it’s a consumer product or a custom internal tool, it’s happening.

    Excited to see where this goes.