Show HN: A People Search Engine with Face Recognition

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...

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

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.

Thank you!

Exactly - this won't be useful for stalkers. We don't crawl or index social media pictures.

Will add FAQ section.

> 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?

doesn't seem to be doing that. It's essentially a glorified google reverse image where the input is a face, then it probably uses the metadata gleaned from that search to look up further info for that person. Will it be accurate? we will have to see

No, we don't. I think my copy might have been confusing. We are simply Perplexity for people - we just summarize a person's internet presence.

“Researching individuals for personalized outreach” is the creepiest sentence I’ve read this month

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/

Thanks for the info. We don't use any private data, only publicly available images. So it won't be a problem, in my opinion.

I will contact my lawyer and double check this.

Not only the EU, but you will have to check with each of the 50 US states as they all have a patchwork of laws. Illinois was one of the first, but I don't know much about it; I thought I read it was pretty extensive to the point some facial recognition companies specifically exclude it. Texas also has its own version as well, that I know of; again don't know details.

You might want to look up Clearview AI, who also took publicly available images, performed biometric recognition on them and ended up with a €30.5 million fine: https://blog.barracuda.com/2024/10/23/clearview-ai-fine-gdpr...

I just did research on this.

Clearview vs Introthem:

- Clearview does photo-to-photo matching. We don't do that, and I don't think I will ever build that.

- You have to provide the name, then we build the faces collection for analyzing at search time and delete it.

- We don't retain any face collection once the search is done.

I still don't know if I am breaking any laws, but here is how Introthem works.

You should definitely find out if you are breaking any laws.

100% this is illegal in Illinois. They have specific biometric data protections. Probably also a crime elsewhere.

yes. and there will be more state laws in the future. seems like it would raise some FCRA concerns to me.

The GDPR works on the personally-identifiable vs anonymous distinction. Private vs public doesn't really factor into it, or at least only becomes relevant in the nuances.

Personally identifiable data is just a mouthful, which is why people like to misleadingly shorten it to private data.

Though novel, this is pretty unethical.

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

[deleted]

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

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.

Sorry, I temporarily paused it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42194170#42202922

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

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

Sorry, I temporarily paused it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42194170#42202922 reply

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

Sorry, I temporarily paused it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42194170#42202922

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

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

Thank you for trying. We are being rate-limited. We are currently fixing it.

Edit:

Fixed!

how are you harvesting all this data?

It's just the Bing search API under the hood. The process is: Query -> Crawl -> Categorize profiles.

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.

I was hoping to find an /s at the end.

Thank you for the feedback :)