Should this creepy search engine exist?

Not us, a different one.

Getty Images

Happy Saturday Searchers,

We’ve got a new one for you.

After stumbling on a new kind of search engine for faces, we called privacy journalist Kashmir Hill. She’s been reporting on the very sudden and unregulated rise of these facial search engines. Here’s the story of the very first one, the mysterious person who made it, and the copycats it helped spawn.

Be sure to check out Kashmir’s book, Your Face Belongs to Us, It reads like a paranoid thriller, even though it’s non-fiction.

Upcoming Board Meeting

We announced this in the episode, but we are having our next BOARD MEETING on May 31st. It will be at 1PM, Eastern time.

If you’re unfamiliar with out board meetings, the way they work: we host a Zoom and then fill everybody in on how the show’s been going and what we’ve learned in the last quarter.

Last time, we shared a lot about our internal metrics … how we’re doing, where we need to get to, audience-wise, for the show to work. This time, once again, expect spreadsheets.

This event is for INCOGNITO MODE subscribers only, we’ll send out a Zoom link that week. And we’ll have an email out in your inbox soon, soliciting your questions, later this week. Also, this time, we will have a recorded version of the board meeting, for paid subscribers. So, if you’re in Japan, and upset about the time we picked, please know I read your email last time, and this is me trying to fix things. ご聴取ありがとうございました.

TO SUBSCRIBE TO INCOGNITO MODE, CLICK THIS AGGRESSIVELY FORMATTED TEXT.

YOU’LL ALSO GET AD-FREE EPISODES OF SEARCH ENGINE AND BONUS EPS.

SORRY ABOUT ALL THE YELLING.

Search Engine on the Longform Podcast

I had the good fortune to be interviewed by national treasure Aaron Lammer on the Longform podcast. It was fun to get a chance to talk about our show and how we make it. If you’ve ever wondered how we make this for you most weeks, or how we pick the questions we run after, we got into all that.

That’s it for us this week. We are away next week, but back the week after with not one, but two episodes. What a value! See you then.

Thanks for listening,

PJ