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28 points vignesh_warar | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.602s | source

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...

Show context
matteason ◴[] No.42194496[source]
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/

replies(1): >>42194541 #
vignesh_warar ◴[] No.42194541[source]
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.

replies(3): >>42195248 #>>42196430 #>>42196751 #
matteason ◴[] No.42195248[source]
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...
replies(1): >>42196331 #
vignesh_warar ◴[] No.42196331[source]
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.

replies(1): >>42196642 #
1. mathgeek ◴[] No.42196642[source]
You should definitely find out if you are breaking any laws.
replies(1): >>42196892 #
2. josefritzishere ◴[] No.42196892[source]
100% this is illegal in Illinois. They have specific biometric data protections. Probably also a crime elsewhere.
replies(1): >>42198617 #
3. knxnts ◴[] No.42198617[source]
yes. and there will be more state laws in the future. seems like it would raise some FCRA concerns to me.