Digital Dignity: Am I in P*rn?

Problem & constraints

Digital Dignity, a Cologne-based organization, runs Am I in P*rn?, a service that lets people check whether their face appears in p*rnographic material published without their consent, and then helps them get it taken down. I joined as a volunteer frontend developer in 2023, alongside my day job, and stayed through the end of 2024.

The product lives inside a knot of constraints that shaped every frontend decision. To search for your face, you have to submit your face, so the search tool itself must not become an instrument of abuse, and it must not hoard the most sensitive biometric data imaginable. On top of that, EU rules treat showing the found material as distributing adult content, so the platform cannot legally display its own search results. And the people using it are, by definition, in a distressing situation, and they are mostly on phones.

The team was small and entirely volunteer: developers guided by a project manager, no designers. Most of my frontend teammates had joined primarily to learn, so much of the rebuild ended up with me, evenings and weekends.

Architecture

The original site was plain HTML/CSS/JS written by the backend developers. I rebuilt the frontend as a responsive Next.js application backed by the team’s Node.js services, with a GitHub CI/CD pipeline, designed mobile-first: the front camera of a phone is the primary capture device.

The search itself works on facial geometry: the browser captures a short live camera sequence, the backend’s in-house service converts the face into a vector representation, and that vector, not the image, is what gets matched against indexed media. Every captured image is discarded immediately after vectorization. Results arrive by email: an official notification first, and if there are matches, links follow from an anonymous address to short-lived external viewing pages, so the platform itself never serves the material. If the person confirms it’s them, the case is handed to a partner law firm that issues a formal takedown demand. The decisions behind it are logged below, each with the alternative it beat.

Outcomes

The frontend went from a static hand-rolled site to a responsive, mobile-first Next.js application with a misuse-resistant capture flow, zero image retention, and lawyer-reviewed GDPR compliance, built in evenings-and-weekends volunteer time.

The limits are worth stating plainly: the rebuilt platform had not gone live by the time I left; other parts of the system still needed work, and my new employment contract ruled out side work during the probation period. The project has since relaunched under the Digital Dignity name at digitaldignity.io, with the finder now available worldwide. I can only speak for the frontend as it stood when I handed it over; what shipped after that is the team’s work, not mine.

Lessons

Two things stay with me. First, the anti-abuse thinking: the most interesting frontend problems here weren’t visual, they were adversarial: every input path had to be examined for how a bad actor could turn a victim-support tool against someone else. Closing the native-camera gallery bypass is a tiny detail no feature list would ever show, and exactly the kind that matters.

Second, the stack: working deeply with React and Next.js is what settled my framework preferences. I found its fast-moving ecosystem and competing conventions harder to build in than Vue’s, and for a project I own I’d still reach for Vue first, a conclusion I could only reach honestly by building something real with React.