How to Find the Real Person behind the Profile Picture?

Posted by Mohann Krish
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In my previous article titled "Are You Not Beautiful?", I had pointed to violation of APSense code of conduct by some of the members. While self-introspection and voluntary action was expected and my nature or etiquette not permitting me to exposing people, I had to do some research a la reverse engineering!


I had come across several celebrities like models and Bollywood film actresses on FaceBook and wondered whether they all had reached the end of their career and had no work to do but chat with people like you and me. To my horror, I found three or four Katrina Kaif's (Bollywood actress) all chatting among themselves. 


My quest for ascertaining facts led me to TinEye! I have culled out the following from their website:

  • TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
  • TinEye was created by Idée Inc. Idée develops advanced image identification and visual search software for photo wire agencies, stock photography firms, entertainment media companies and some of the world's leading imaging firms including Adobe Systems Inc., iStockphoto, and Associated Press.
  • TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. It is free to use for non-commercial searching.
  • TinEye regularly crawls the web for new images, and we also accept contributions of complete online image collections. To date, TinEye has indexed 1,958,654,947 images from the web to help you find what you're looking for.
  • The free for non-commercial use version of TinEye at tineye.com allows you to do up to 50 searches per day, up to 150 searches per week. 
If you want to conduct an experiment, just right-click on a suspiciously good looking profile picture and select 'copy image link'. Paste the link in the search box of TinEye! Find out the celebrity 'culprit' !

Well, who is the real and who is the unreal?