Sherlock is an app that is making a huge comeback on social media. You frame a face, or upload a photograph, and she is able to trace all the social profiles of that person. Not only that, starting from the photo they can also find information to better understand what is in his life. The app has several problems, starting with marketing.
It is a format that is often seen on social media, especially in summer. A video of a few seconds with a person at the center, a photoa somewhat blurry shot. “I saw him at a party, can you help me find him.” “I met this girl last night, we introduced ourselves but I don’t know who she is. Help me track her down.” Now, net of romantic occasions it is not difficult to think that they are also hiding behind these appeals stalking episodes. If that girl hasn’t left you her number or Instagram profile, maybe it’s because he didn’t want to leave you. But now there is an app that allows you to do this. Or rather, there are gods videos that tell about this app. From what we are seeing, the story is much more complex.
Let’s start with social media. How he rebuilt Facta.newsTikTok is full of videos talking about this Sherlock App. Videos are of many types. Sometimes it’s just a joke: you use your smartphone to frame the face of a person on the street, you take a photo and then start your search through the Sherlock app. At this point the user who is filming the video approaches and begins to interact with the person being filmedsurprising her with the information that meanwhile he recovered on her. In other cases, however, we see the reaction of people after they searched for a face on Sherlock. In this case the contents are very similar to those we had seen with the campaigns on DeepSearch. In still other cases, the Sherlock app pops up in a podcast, while something else is being discussed. And it is presented as a trending and very useful app.
In fact it has become one. As was able to check Fanpage.itwe can find an app called Sherlock and it deals with facial recognition with over 100,000 downloads only on Google Play Store, the market dedicated to those who have an Android smartphone. Is called Sherlock: AI Face Search and it appears to have the similar design. But with the same name we also find Sherlock Face Searchthis time with 10,000 downloads. And then there is a site, SherlockSearch.comon which thousands of users are landing. People who perhaps don’t find what they expect.
If you look carefully at the photo, Mini You is an excellent way to give data to artificial intelligence
Fake content: paid advertising and subscriptions
The veneer of success crumbles easily. Most of the apps lumped together under the Sherlock name are very cheesy. The detective of Arthur Conan Doyle would file a lawsuit seeing his name associated with such an embarrassing tool. Let’s start from a premise: all the services we found starting from this campaign are paid. The figures range from 4.99 euros for a single search at tens of euros for annual subscriptions. The marketing is done well. Searching for information starting from a person’s photo you can see all the results. You can always sense something from the shapes and colors. In most cases, especially with female faces, the first result is always OnlyFans and this even if the research subject has never been registered on the platform. With the paid version the situation doesn’t improve much. However, with this tool, it remains difficult to trace the identity of a person starting only from the photograph.
So where do all those videos come from? How is it possible that such an app has been used by so many people, with such high reviews without being so powerful? The answer lies in two steps. The first is technical. When you download the app to proceed with the settings it is mandatory to leave a review before continuing. Nothing written, just a rating indicated with stars. We imagine that many users caught up in the enthusiasm of having just downloaded the app decide to give it their all. The second step is directly marketing. Many of the videos that hit social media with this app are undeclared advertisements. Fake jokes, fake podcasts, fake clips that only serve to generate content to inflate the phenomenon. Not only that. The Sherlock Search TikTok profile There’s something strange about him: he has 219,000 followers, 3.5 million likes but only 12 videos. Very far from those metrics. It is likely the profile of an old project sold or recycled for new purposes.
