Most people have such weird and illogical views on privacy. A website collecting face pictures without anything else is pretty useless. Walking in to a retail store owned by a company using facial recognition on a huge range of owned stores is a serious privacy issue.

Face pictures and IP adresses...

And browser fingerprint and operating system.

And the bait on the hook is not a good indicator either - an appeal to a deep drive or insecurity in many people.

Obviously not determinative in itself ,but if I wanted to harvest a lot of faces in a hurry, that's exactly the sort of bait that I would use (I can hardly think of a better one off the top of my head).

So what's the concern here ? I'm sure I have plenty of photos of me online tagged by other people.

Do those photos show you operating system and browser ?

Not useless at all, there are usually enough pictures of people on the internet with names, metadata, etc attached to immediately link and identify. Basically what Clearview does (did?). I would not be surprised if this was a data collection siphon.

> I would not be surprised if this was a data collection siphon.

Except for it being sponsored by Eu - home to the most effective privacy jurisdiction on the planet.

The same organization pushing for mass surveillance?

I don't think this is a scam/data collection site (as others have recognized the researcher involved, etc.), but what would stop a random website from claiming it was "sponsored by the EU"?

Easy enough to check using browser dev tools.

> Devil’s advocate here. What could go wrong?

Could be used for a scam, by a stalker, for social engineering, or several other evil ploys. Today, there are so many possible bad actions which are happening... On average, they are unlikely, but not impossible. And who knows about the long run.

> If you open a website in a fresh browser context and let it use your camera, isn’t this about the same as walking down a street with CCTV cameras?

In my country, there are harsh regulations on public cameras. Private people are not even allowed to capture you outside from being in the background.

Could be a scam, but the guy has a Dutch accent and talks about privacy, so it's probably fine.

(I'm 54% averagely normal)

Which country is that?

A member of the European Union, there are strong regulations for all countries here.

You have to weigh “what could go wrong?” with “what could go right?”

The worst case scenario is far greater in magnitude than the best case scenario.

Just not worth any risk here.

A website can collect millions of faces in a few hours. A CCTV camera can only collect data from a single area.

It's more akin to those spying doorbells from Amazon and friends, which I personally would try to avoid when I can.

The concentration of data and the lack of necessity of your face being recorded in the first place change the decision making process significantly.

It could use that to impersonate you in a mobile banking application through biometric authentication. It's getting pretty popular in my country (I think it's required by law or something).

> fresh browser context

I get your point, but I am not sure how fresh our browser context is.

I just mean private browsing or incognito or whatever. It’s 2 seconds away in any popular browser.

web site has much more information about you that it can connect.