Have you ever met an attractive person and wondered what she or he would look like nude? A couple of porn websites have made that fantasy come true, using facial-recognition technology to match user-submitted images of people to adult performers. But there doesn’t appear to be any strategy on the part of the persons whose pictures are submitted. And what is going on if somebody uses the matches to harass an ex-girlfriend, an ex-spouse or a friend’s mom?

Oops, you look familiar

Eddie Arenas, Naughty America chief executive officer, said they considered facial matching to be the future and they stood behind it, when his company’s ‘Face Match’ feature has been launched in June. What they have developed was a system where users could visually show them exactly what they wanted and then see similar pictures.

Face Match is available at face.naughtyamerica.com (the front page is safe for work). It gives you an opportunity to upload, link to or email a JPEG image from a computer or mobile phone. It ensures to find porn stars who look like the person whose picture you uploaded, along with links to photos and videos of those porn stars in the industry.

But not everything is that easy. We tried it using a public-domain picture of ex Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but whether we used a URL link or a direct upload, the Naughty America website said that “high domain volume” prohibited the feature from working immediately. Instead, the website required our email address in order to send us the matches. We don’t want pornography emails come to us at work, so we stopped immediately there.

We looked at some of the samples offered on the Face Match site. They were not too convincing. Five matches were given for ‘Call Me Maybe’ Carly Rae Jepsen, but none of them in fact looked like her, other than sharing Jepsen’s brunette shoulder-length hair. Meanwhile, the matches for a purported user’s ‘hot neighbor’ (of course a model) were even further off – they couldn’t even get the proper hair color. And matches for shock-jock Howard Stern were all girls.

The other amusingly named service, SexFaceFinder (front page is scarcely safe for work) also matches pictures, but this time the results are girls on the other end of paid live-video-chat services. ‘Upload any image of your dream girl and find her HOT LIVE look-alike!’ the website says. We tried the recent secretary of state once again. While the image uploaded right, no results were found. Probably there were not any 50+ black women with bobbed hair in the database.

So we tried another familiar person: Kim Kardashian. Amazingly, the woman whose face has been published by thousand supermarket-checkout magazine covers has no matches on SexFaceFinder.

Who is nice, and who is filthy

Despite its failure at facial recognition, SexFaceFinder has some benefits over Naughty America’s Face Match. Not only SexFaceFinder lets you upload BMP and PNG files as well as JPEGs, but it promises to ‘never save the images you upload’, and doesn’t pull a bait-and-switch to harvest your email address. Nobody can use it in absolute privacy.

In that perspective, as ZDNet’s Violet Blue points out, SexFaceFinder is adhering to the Federal Trade Commission’s recent recommendations towards facial-recognition technology. The FTC asks that firms using that technology ‘develop reasonable security protection for the data they collect, and sound methods for determining when to keep data and when to dispose of it.’

Naughty America might not be complying. Some of its purportedly user-submitted samples appear to be of private citizens, who may not know they have been matched in public to adult performers. In its Terms of Service for Face Match, Naughty America claims that ‘You acknowledge that any content that you upload…may be edited, modified, removed, published, transmitted and showed by the Company and you waive any rights you may have in the material.’

Moreover, ‘The Company is not responsible and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third person,’ and users affirm that ‘submissions to the website shall not represent or display any individual who is under the age of 18 years old or under the age of majority.’ An email searching comment from La Touraine, Inc., parent firm of Naughty America, wasn’t immediately returned.

Violet Blue reported in her ZDNet posting, that she hopes nobody figures out the hard way whether or not Naughty America and SexFaceFinder’s databases are maintained with technologies in place to deal with fake, unacceptable or misattributed information. But she may not get much reason to worry about.

As far as we could say, Face Match has got a general of 27 submissions since it launched in June, and the majority of the photos submitted have been of celebrities. And while SexFaceFinder seemed to deal with privacy issues properly, in our tests it just didn’t work.