Reverse-Lookup Service Exposed Millions of Photos of People’s Faces

When someone uploads a photo to the people-search tool ClarityCheck, the website has a clear message: “Your reverse image search is private and secure.” New research, though, shows that the website left more than 9 million image files, including photographs of people’s faces, publicly exposed. And a second misconfiguration publicly exposed people’s email addresses and phone numbers.
Reported by 1 outlet — WIRED. See all sources ↓
When someone uploads a photo to the people-search tool ClarityCheck, the website has a clear message: “Your reverse image search is private and secure.” New research, though, shows that the website left more than 9 million image files, including photographs of people’s faces, publicly exposed. And a second misconfiguration publicly exposed people’s email addresses and phone numbers. Overall, according to findings from independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, the exposed ClarityCheck database contained roughly 450 GB of images, including what appeared to be profile images, screenshots, and other photographs of adults, teenagers, and children. All of the images were stored in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, with files in folders named “faces” and “profiles,” which could be accessed by anyone online through a URL included in the company’s publicly available website code.
Read the full report at WIRED ↗
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- What's the story?
- When someone uploads a photo to the people-search tool ClarityCheck, the website has a clear message: “Your reverse image search is private and secure.” New research, though, shows that the website left more than 9 million image files, including photographs of people’s faces, publicly exposed. And a second misconfiguration publicly exposed people’s email addresses and phone numbers.
- How widely is it covered?
- 1 outlet, average source rating 7.0/10.
- When was it last updated?
- 10m ago.
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Reverse-Lookup Service Exposed Millions of Photos of People’s Faces
Sources1TypeCoverageWIRED