Most people have such weird and illogical views on privacy. A website collecting face pictures without anything else is pretty useless. Walking in to a retail store owned by a company using facial recognition on a huge range of owned stores is a serious privacy issue.
And the bait on the hook is not a good indicator either - an appeal to a deep drive or insecurity in many people.
Obviously not determinative in itself ,but if I wanted to harvest a lot of faces in a hurry, that's exactly the sort of bait that I would use (I can hardly think of a better one off the top of my head).
Not useless at all, there are usually enough pictures of people on the internet with names, metadata, etc attached to immediately link and identify. Basically what Clearview does (did?). I would not be surprised if this was a data collection siphon.
I don't think this is a scam/data collection site (as others have recognized the researcher involved, etc.), but what would stop a random website from claiming it was "sponsored by the EU"?
Could be used for a scam, by a stalker, for social engineering, or several other evil ploys. Today, there are so many possible bad actions which are happening... On average, they are unlikely, but not impossible. And who knows about the long run.
> If you open a website in a fresh browser context and let it use your camera, isn’t this about the same as walking down a street with CCTV cameras?
In my country, there are harsh regulations on public cameras. Private people are not even allowed to capture you outside from being in the background.
It could use that to impersonate you in a mobile banking application through biometric authentication. It's getting pretty popular in my country (I think it's required by law or something).
If you open a website in a fresh browser context and let it use your camera, isn’t this about the same as walking down a street with CCTV cameras?