WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) sent a follow up letter to Giorgi Gobronidze, the CEO of PimEyes, after the company failed to adequately address her concerns and take responsibility for its facial recognition technology being used by leftist activists to dox Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Senator Blackburn introduced the Protecting Law Enforcement from Doxxing Act, which would make it illegal to publish the name of a federal law enforcement officer with the intent to obstruct a criminal investigation or immigration operation. Death threats against ICE officers have increased by 8,000% in fiscal year 2025.

Blackburn Calls Out PimEyes for Downplaying the Role It Plays in Increasing Threats Against ICE Agents

"Your response sidesteps the role that your platform specifically plays in perpetuating and broadening the range of these harms. As technology continues to outpace lawmaking, your overreliance on regulatory compliance is an insufficient defense. Additionally, I disagree that this platform empowers the reclaiming of identities more than it compromises them. I am following up in writing to reiterate these concerns. Your claim that, '[f]ollowing full cooperation, authorities identified no violations of applicable data protection law,' places too little emphasis on ethical responsibility and too much on regulatory compliance. Current regulatory frameworks lack sufficient data protection, and mere compliance is not a strict enough threshold in comparison to the possible harms."

PimEyes Cannot Hide Behind Technicalities

"Second, you rely heavily on the distinction between biometric identifiers and photographic analysis, which is a semantic rather than substantive distinction. A photo of an individual's face is perhaps one of the best likeness and identity matches, regardless of whether it is arrived at through pixel comparison or biometric data. You have stated in your response that the larger risk to officer safety is already public information that is not generated by PimEyes. Despite the fact that PimEyes does not text search, Mr. Skinner-who used image recognition software such as yours to dox federal officers-has publicly acknowledged that name alone is sufficient to find other personal data regarding an individual or their family online. Both statements are factual realities: Searching names alone can easily generate corresponding facial matches and searching faces alone can easily lead to names. Therefore, platforms like PimEyes are vital links in the chain of potential harm and are not vindicated by the absence of name identifiers. Even if the software is not technically assigning an identity during the search, there is certainly no debate that the process itself is used for the very purpose of identification."

PimEyes Indexes and Amplifies Doxxing Content

"Although PimEyes does not create the content it indexes and that content is already publicly accessible, your platform amplifies the already available content. Downplaying this reality as a symptom of the open web refuses to take ownership over PimEyes's part in discovering, recovering, concentrating, and linking information once scattered. Accordingly, regardless of the self-characterizations, any legislative or regulatory efforts to combat doxxing, protect law enforcement, or protect personal likeness and data should consider platforms similar to but not exclusive to PimEyes within its scope."

Click here to read the full letter.

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