OREANDA-NEWS. May 18, 2016. A facial recognition service in Russia is putting public anonymity at risk by letting people photograph strangers and identify them using an app.

Tapping into publicly available data from popular Russian social network Vkontakte, the app, called FindFace, claims to have a 70 percent success rate when it comes to identifying people.

FindFace has been in existence only since February, but popular awareness of it has flourished thanks to a widely publicized project by Russian photographer Egor Tsvetkov, called "Your face is big data," in which he used the app to ID people he'd photographed on the subway. FindFace now has 500,000 registered users and has processed nearly 3 million searches, according to its founders.

This level of intrusion will surely add to people's existing range of privacy concerns regarding facial recognition. Facebook, for instance, has come under fire for the potential storage of "Faceprint" data, which allows software to recognize members of the social network by their faces. But FindFace goes one or two intrusive steps beyond that.

FindFace markets itself as a dating service, but its founders hope to eventually make money from licensing its algorithm to law enforcement and retail companies. The company told the Guardian that it has already been contacted by Russian police about using the tech.