We already have deployed in my country that technology. We like that our Republican friends in your country support face recognition because they can record a voter's face going in to vote, find out where they live and who is in their family and use that knowledge to track the voter, subject them to propaganda and possibly subtle but effective pressure to vote in favor of members of the Republican party. We use it on our people and it is effective in controlling their voting and political thinking.
11
Sigh. It seems only yesterday that the ACLU was getting a case of the vapors over caller ID.
178
@James R. Filyaw
Funny. However, you do realize the ACLU was basically right. Caller ID was invented in 1968 and provided the theoretical progenitor for internet protocols invented roughly a decade latter. You can thank caller ID for your IP Address. A mechanism by which all internet traffic is ultimately traceable. All networked traffic in general actually.
Even with tunneling and end-to-end encryption, the meta data on your digital signature exists indefinitely. The property is owned by people you have no control over. You should slow down before you start cracking jokes about caller ID.
66
This is fantastic. I wish facial recognition was everywhere. It would solve so many of the property crimes, drug crimes, and petty thefts that plague our city. Not that these individuals would necessarily be held accountable, but the next step would be for us as a neighborhood to be able to detect these individuals upon entering the neighborhood and work together to keep our neighbors, children, and homes safe.
100
@Dara
You are assuming the program is always reliable. As someone who uses similar analyses on animals, you are mistaken.
128
You don’t take any account of all the other terrible consequences that this will bring - you are only seeing what’s right in front of you. If you would stop and think about it ... you might wait for solution that isn’t so dangerous.
133
@Dara
Maybe, although that’s what proponents of cameras in public areas said, too. I’m sure, like most technologies, those cameras have aided people in solving crimes in amazing ways, but they have led to false positives, too. Those seem way more dangerous than the good.
Ask anyone wrongly tried, convicted, and placed on death row. I’m sure they and their families would agree about the dangers even as many in the general public would not. The spirit of putting our own perceived needs, real or imagined, before our equals’ will be one of the mistakes that undoes us as a society.
70
no wonder the chinese government is interested in facial recognition. pretty much all han chinese share these features: dark hair, dark eyes, slanted eyes and clear skin tone... it's not the old stupid adage "they all look alike" but the uniformity of chinese crowds is striking and at times a little disconcerting. facial recognition was used in hong kong and justifiably feared.
7
"It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color."
Which would be great for me, if US law enforcementndidnt have a tendency to deliver false convictions to certain groups, like people of color. Sheesh.
7
Scary stuff and the reason I limit my use of social media...
7
This sound likes fishy.
A man I know who is leaving China after living there for 20 years reports that he lived in a small city of 7.5 million people and that there are 38 cameras in the intersection closest to his house.
Could it be that the mysterious Mr. Ton-That, the Australian "techie and model" [I'm wiping my eyes.] who has conjured this up a full blown facial recognition from a Eureka moment (Gold!) after systematically scraping the entire internet for photos and identities.
I don't believe the "little" company angle one bit.
From the description in this article this little "app" is actually an enormous computer system with an equally enormous database system back end for scanning the web for images of faces from all angles and correlating that with accompanying scraped identities.
Excuse me while I roll my eyes. This is not the equivalent of the invention of Apple in a garage in California.
Is the Chinese government trying to go public in the United States as a profit making corporation with the facial recognition technology it has developed over decades for internal security and organized state oppression?
Any one who cares about freedom and liberty should be riveted by the question.
Watch the following video of Chinese police killing a protester in Hong Kong all the way to the end to see what the face of computer surveillance and facial recognition looks like. The flying squad uses it.
https://www.facebook.com/CupidProducer/videos/506613646588079/
17
What was that saying? Those who would trade liberty for safety deserve neither
26
Women could use this to uncover predators. Could save a lot of lives.
2
George Orwell was off by 36 years.
23
How many of a stories and movies will be seen as impossible in the future when people view them 50, 100 years from now? The kids will say, that could never happen the mind police will have prevented that from even getting started. The police wouldn’t have been fooled by the criminal’s or superhero’s disguise. Even the Boston Tea Party will be a wonder.
4
I fully concur with Facial recognition now described as "facecrime" "is a dystopian & Orwellian world of 1984." It was and is terribly dangerous to let your thoughts and facial pictures appear in any public area with cameras that could capture you and turn you over to any law enforcement authorities for possible use as identifying anyone of us as criminals.
3
George 's 1984, version 3.0
5
If this helps solve crimes and puts bad people behind bars, so be it. frankly this would skew towards white people because when you hear about the digital divide poor, black/brown is social media less. We need safety more than privacy.
1
Oh gloom, Oh doom, Oh woe, said all the people on facebook, instagram, snapchat, and twitter.
5
Revelation 13 KJV
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
3
Just imagine anyone who posts pictures of themselves on sex hookup sites. Enough said. How many people truly "have nothing to hide"?
1
OMG... within 6 months, there will be a dozen knockoff versions free for public use.
Women will experience an exponential surge in stalking resulting in non Muslim women wearing veils in public.
In a year, women will abandon social media en masse. Men will follow.
And privacy will return.
8
This app will make it much easier for Trump to round up Democrats after the next and last election.
9
No company did this. Society did this. People splash their entire lives online, want to be connected 24/7, carry devices that are connected 24 hours a day to the largest public highway human history has ever seen, and they expect privacy? How many people are online at any given moment? Doesn't work both ways, folks. Where do you think they go these images? Yes, from people posting them. Make sure to leave your name and location to post. Oh, and sign up with more info! But remember folks, Privacy first! Also, if you want to subscribe, sign up with Address, name, number, Payment info. But, privacy!
2
Such technologies will be a boon for kidnapping, extortion, intimidation, corporate & government espionage, human trafficking, anti-Semitic attacks, profiling, .....
Then there is the commercial profit angle:
Consider a restaurant of the future that uses such public data about all of its patrons. As you enter the restaurant, your profile and financial data is scanned instantly. You are then seated in their "VIP" section (where unbeknownst to you, prices for the same meal costs triple what it costs in their "common seating" section). Of course the VIP section is better decorated, has soft music and scents wafting through the air, and your meal arrives on better tableware. The restaurant profiled you as a "rich" customer, and is charging you much more, because you are able to pay.
What if the restaurant found through your online profile that you have a prolific history of drinking and enjoying alcohol - and thus charges you even higher for alcoholic drinks?
Of course, the menus in the VIP section show no prices. If you inquire on the price of a dish, you are only told of the elevated price. Of course your food is identical to that in the "common" section.
This is currently legal. Airlines do so with every ticket purchase (they charge different rates based on various criteria - so your seatmate may have paid 5x higher than you, even when you are sitting next to each other).
If you never learn that the restaurant charged you a much higher rate, were you harmed?
9
I also thought I would never live in a world where a country and Congress would sit back quietly while we attacked another for so called “preemptive strikes”based on false information or fears of what they “might” do. And do absolutely nothing. Literally attack a country that never attacked us and then try to look like the victim. Unbelievable!. No nothing will be done about this and it will be used & abused for personally gain just like the war powers and the patriot act have been in this misguided fearful country. Beyond sad
9
What a coincidence that there are no women involved in this start-up or its funding and at the same time nobody has thought how easily their app would allow people to stalk, harass, follow, and harm random women on the street.
19
I stopped reading at this sentence for a "pause to reflect" moment.
"In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir."
It's foolish to think there are no benign interests there among those founders and investors. The tech world wants to believe it operates from a value neutral platform, that they are apolitical, and that our newfound powers are making the world a better place. What a scheme! Offer folks $1,000 phones where they can take photos and curate their entire lives, draw maps of their workout routes, watch movies, call their office from the dog park, search the internet for restaurant reviews, set the alarm for 5:30 a.m., listen to music, translate French menus to English, look in on their child at day care, and do your banking. Then you get folks to carry those phones wherever they go, so you scan and save every bit of data on those phones and know every step of their day and provide it to the authorities - whatever they might be. If a government came up with a scheme to get folks to carry a device so they could be watched every step of their day, there would be a howl heard to the moon (recorded on surveillance satellites). The game is over, folks. We are in an autocratic regime top to bottom and our phones are the symbol of our loss of democracy and privacy.
15
This is exactly what we don't need!
3
An Israeli Company have already created an AI Software app that is used by Governments to monitor its citizens, which also possibly led to Mr Koshoggis state sponsored death. It taps onto whatsapp and other internet based protocol com systems to spy on conversations, imagery and locations of users.
The company claims to sell to Governments only.
Orwell's brave new world is here for sure.
3
China has had this kind of tech for a while. Ever since they got it they have been using it. It is the nature of computer coding, once the program is made, someone else will be able to make it again, or just use the first person's code, then the building on the sand pile begins.
Humans as a species have used this ability as long as we have been Humans, as far as we know. We learn baby steps, then get into running and then space flight.
The end of privacy has been a topic of futurist Fiction for decades, That anyone didn't see this coming, means they didn't watch the twilight zone enough.
If you want to puzzle over this and fear for the future, get out there in the local elections and VOTE... or your freedoms will be taken from you, if that isn't already to late.
That Americans have almost stopped voting, means the gov't can do end runs around all those freedoms that were fought for by those folks that fought for them, way back when. Lazy Americans is not just an insult it's the truth. You don't know what you have lost till it's gone.
VOTE while you still can.
4
Burka culture was a thousand years ahead of this. The garments protect the skin, and now they might protect identity. Some say bin Laden managed to cross borders by wearing traditional female dress. Using this, we might be able to cross the street without someone doing facial recognition to learn who we are, where we live, and perhaps even link to our financial histories.
3
I have an identical twin. If she does something shady, will I be held responsible?
7
Three commments.
1. This means that one cannot safely visit a country in which this app is used.
2. The Doppelgänger effect makes it useless for catching criminals.
3. Is someone able to explain how police is allowed to use this app without judicial authorisation? And how is such authorisation forthcoming when there is no investigation of its reliability? And the implications?
8
Like the last line from this comical wanna be techie giant that he had to think of the consequences of his App. Ethics is no where visible in an industry filled with insecure people wanting the easy ride to fame and fortune. As we watch the farce of the Senate impeachment trial, we should consider how this world could change if we had a government run by unethical immoral and amoral people. Oh, yeah right that has begun. The statement that this technology cannot be stopped is the defeatist mindset promoted by the industry. Laws can cut their profits down considerably especially if they are liable criminally. But in the present incompetent federal government run by profiteers the states will have to protect the masses until we have a government worth the money we have invested in.
2
Yet another reason to just say No whenever a personal data merchant like Linked-In or Facebook badgers you for your photo.
Or if they're too pesky, give them a picture of your dog.
4
This is bad. And as always, the poor and oppressed will suffer most while the wealthy and well connected get away with everything as they always have. Maybe people should start wearing masks when they go out in public.
2
To begin, if an associate of Giuliani or Thiel himself are involved in any way, you can bet it will be nefarious.
This is outrageous. There is no way it won’t be abused. I’d dare say that most corporations and law enforcement agencies employ a preponderance or people who have no regard for privacy laws, and/or whom are “for sale.”
Laughable to hear Facebook spokesperson talk about violating its “rules.”
This needs laws with teeth to stop it... now! It’s probably impossible to roll it back but we must try.
Even for existing databases, the law should mandate that they are wiped completely clean every year.
The potential Orwellian nightmare to come will be much worse than letting a few shoplifters get away.
6
Reminds me of a novel by William Gibson, Virtual Light, where through glasses, everything displays data on it's narrative. You'll know everything about anything just by looking at it.
1
As a woman I find it incredibly creepy and scary that anyone could take my picture on the street and find my address. I am likely too old to worry about anyone caring about where I live on sight, but shudder for younger women, especially women with jealous or violent exes who might be in real danger if all the guy needs is a picture of them...
13
Convenience, cash, or fun will be our undoing.
As we play, or use an "APP", or do "Selfies, all this stuff
is filed, and could come back to haunt us,
1
Yes, there are negatives that need to be worked out. But there are many positives too. currently criminals know that it’s near impossible to get caught for doing a crime. I worked in China 25 years and before everyone jaywalked, rode motorbikes without a license, beat up other people if you wanted to, hit and run, rape, steal.... as you would almost never get caught. Now all these small crimes are way down as most people know they will quickly be caught if they do something wrong. There are cameras everywhere with great facial recognition so that police can use a computer software to fine people for small crimes. Dangerous criminals there are all hiding as if they walk around outside anywhere in China they will instantly be caught by the police as the software will alert them. This, makes China a much safer place for law abiding people. I found this system to be good and I didn’t care the cameras followed everything as I was not doing anything wrong.
1
Orwell was an optimist.
8
This technology identifies undercover police as well.
6
LA is experiencing a wave of brazen robberies. The thieves make no attempt to conceal their faces. The local TV stations run the footage and ask anyone who recognizes them to phone the police. Nothing happens, of course. The thieves are driving rental cars down from the San Francisco Bay Area. This could be ended quickly with facial recognition. The entire MO could be stopped cold!
5
Canadians tired of wearing multiple layers of clothing to be protected in Winter, show-off by an ultimate show of liberty by having a Nude marathon in Toronto each year in Spring. Ladies as far as as China come watch this event.
A Maple Leaf is just an inverted Fig Leaf.
It is terrible but unfortunately it is just another step toward even greater disaster out of the science fiction book:
criminals wearing masks - mimicking others...
Nonexistent people's profiles … created to commit crimes ..
new software which makes real people "walk and talk" in virtual reality and "commiting crimes" on uploaded "surveilance videos"....
The unintended consequences are endles but the real life will still surprise us I am afraid.
3
Dont Worry. Major Intelligence Agencies will Hack it and Bug It.
2
How about we all copyright our image and prohibit its capturing or use without our express written permission? Then anyone who uses our image for any purpose can be sued for copywrite infringement. It seems that only legal action which will cost our image capturers or users billions of Dollars in damages will put an end to this foolishness.
8
“There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it," said Hoan Ton-That, the AI software creator said.
No, not a community, but lots and lots of evil people, such as Putin and others in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines, Orban in Hungary, Xi in China, who probably has developed his own; also, criminal enterprises, drug cartels, cybercriminals, pedophiles, and so on, will possess and use such technology.
Within the U.S. police departments and other agencies that use Clearview software, how is access to and use of the abusable and harmful technology controlled and protected from its illicit use?
Such technology is like the atomic and hydrogen bombs, their proliferation may be slowed, but not stopped.
Like gene manipulation, facial recognition software will get better. Then, who will be able to say they have a truly private life? Welcome to the brave new world and 1984.
1
I wonder if this program will soon be used on pets too? Some dogs should be kept off the streets
The misconception many are making about this application is that if the police receive a ‘hit’ on a photo they immediately go out and arrest the person. No professional police agency would do this. The hit is just one piece of possible evidence which must be linked with other evidence before someone should be arrested and charged. Although it’s true that such a tool could be abused by the police, it should be noted the police already have at their disposal access to local, state and national databases with millions of records which they use on a daily basis. Many of these records, such as driver’s license data and photos, are for citizens who have done nothing wrong. If used properly, coupled with safeguards already in place in most police departments, this will be an effective tool for solving serious crimes when all the present methods have been exhausted.
3
The article discusses the data bases that are used and how inadequate the are. If someone has never been arrested they do not have a photo in the data base, this app can use any photo online.
4
“Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”
I don't have to imagine a foreign government. I only need to imagine our own.
12
If they’ve scraped photos that means they’ve also scraped their meta data which has even more information about people. Not to be a tinfoil hat wearer but I’m sure we’re only a few steps away from them figuring out how to merge their product with other photo databases (law enforcement, the DMV, even our office ids, etc.).
Guess I’ll be wearing sunglasses all the time in public now. Not that I’ve anything to hide, but because it’s one of my last defenses against complete privacy invasion.
6
Well ! A new business will emerge - the temporary nose one can wear in public. The geometry is based on your features, the positioning and their triangulation to one another mathematically. Glasses do not hide bone structure. We will need some temporary prosthetics or fun masks to wear out daily! Who knows maybe the word could get more creative.
4
@Che Brown
Don't forget the baseball cap and the Groucho Marx nose. Bet Amazon will be selling out of surgical masks very quickly.
3
Sorry, but public privacy is a myth.
For most of human history, most of us lived our lives in small communities, either villages or enclaves within bigger towns and cities. Everyone knew and could recognize everyone else. And most of the time we had a pretty good idea of what each other was doing.
For a brief period, as large cities swelled, more people gathered quickly in the millions. Seeing someone we recognize, or someone that might recognize us, became more rare. Now technology has restored the ability to know where we all are.
IMO we have no "right" to be anonymous, and perhaps anonymity itself has degraded our social behavior. Knowing others, and knowing that others are watching us, influences our behavior--probably for the better.
And if we worry about what the government might do with surveillance we should not try to limit that surveillance but instead be very cautious about vesting more power in official social control.
3
@Bob Krantz
So Bob, you're a "guns don't kill people" guy, yes?
Granted its a stretch to attribute any form of consciousness to surveillance technology or, worse, the combined force of almost infinite identification technologies, but they have a sort of consciousness-by-proxy programmed into their ticking hearts by techies nice or malign.
Combine that with that monster Facebook , designed specifically to be evil, and the monstrous Zuckerberg and we have a problem that outruns hoping for good guys in government by a mile.
You and I both know it will never, ever be allowed to happen, or be even mildly effective if it does, but this body of technology needs to be restrained, made available only to people who at least pretend to be accountable.
Failing that, we are embarked on the baby steps of Blade Runner society, where underground extremes of behavior predominate among "good"people simply for the sake of keeping themselves marginally safe and their private lives at least nominally private.
Those, like you, who want us to lie down and take it are among the scariest beings on this sad planet.
7
Big brother is here. It took a while but make no mistake, it is here and now.
With the advent of the computer, our privacy was up for grabs. Now privacy is a word that will be stricken from the dictionary.
1984, we are now.
7
What a genius Orwell was. He is proof of the importance of art and the importance of listening to artists. The conformist society is the most dangerous one.
3
Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback that his technology could be used for nefarious purposes. It leads me to wonder how careful they have been to protect their databases from expert and/or foreign state-sponsored hackers. Consider that they have refused to allow independent testers verify the accuracy of their technology. As a long-time high tech innovator, I've learned that tiny companies take significant shortcuts to be first to market.
7
Consider this: The witness protection program is now obsolete.
18
This is just latest news that tells me that I and my peers lived through the most freedom this country will ever likely see and were the last generation to do so.
We lived with the advent of the automobile and the interstate highway system. The auto and improved road system gave more Americans the freedom to travel when and where they wanted. There were no “papers” to carry, your drivers license and money was all that you needed and you could go just about anywhere you wished. You weren’t being followed and tracked by electronic surveillance systems. Your car or your ride service didn’t have onboard tracking and monitoring technology. No cell phone was racing your steps. Freedom.
It may be easier to travel in the future where you just call up a pod to take you somewhere, but everything about your trip will be known, tracked, monitored. You will also likely have to schedule the trip to fit within available slots of time.
And the there is your house which spys on you. And all that is before you step out the door to be monitored by the state.
1984. A Brave New World. The Empire.
11
Great. The article says the app isn't as accurate in identifying other races. Including, I am assuming, certain populations who are already disproportionately targeted by law enforcement, various department stores, etc., for profiling. What could possibly go wrong?
11
I’m aware of the theoretical concerns about facial recognition but I keep thinking about how much more difficult it would be for the myriad of “bad guys” who currently want to victimize me and my family. And I’m not a “bad guy.”
3
@Independent
And I’m not a “bad guy.”
Prove it, Citizen.
2
Not sure if the benefits outweigh the risks of using this technology. I have not read George Orwell's "1984" since high school. Think I will need to dust off that book and re-read it!
5
They say everyone has a double and this technology would get me in a second, my double that is. I had this problem in the 70's without facial recognition, imagine how may could be found guilty of a crime committed by their double. This technology should be banned.
4
We all need a lightweight breathable mask for wearing in public. Taking unauthorized photos of someone in a public place should be prohibited. Software might soon become available to scrub your image from various internet platforms.
I might start wearing a DJT mask on public.
5
At a recent visit to my primary care doctor at Kaiser, the medical assistant asked if she could take my photo for my chart. I adamantly said, ABSOLUTELY NOT!
I’m sure she was confused by my forceful no. I don’t care. I won’t have my photo taken, won’t participate in the ubiquitous “surveys” asking, how did we do? Will you rate this movie you rented? How did our service rep do? NO, NONE OF IT. Nothing about my life is anyone’s business and I will constantly make the effort to not be captured and leave no trace. I’m not on social media. If I do have to give a photo for some service I use, I always make sure it’s some anonymous graphic image, not my face.
This was the most chilling article I’ve read in awhile.
13
@Jet Phillips
You may not desire to have your photograph taken, but you may rest assured they have already taken it.
4
This is the type of software NSA has had for a long time. The technology is here and the genie is out of the bottle: I say remove the elitism from the tech and equal the playing field by providing the technology dirt cheap to everyone — The company gets its billions and everyone has access to the same level of search power.
2
Interesting that the founder admits the images were scraped from platforms in violation of those platforms' terms of use, and that LE organizations are in business with a guy who simply uses the "but everyone else is doing it" excuse. Wondering if there is an implication for customers or if an indemnity clause would cover them for Clearview's wrongdoing. No doubt the platforms of image origination would probably settle for a fat check from Clearview, if they go after them at all.
As much as I want to return to the US from abroad soon for friends and family, our country is on an insanely dangerous path compared to our EU allies with regard to data privacy laws.
7
@Lost It makes me wonder if a suspect could challenge the legality of their arrest based upon illegal search if his or her photo was obtained in violation of Facebooks terms.
3
@MikeLT
Oh, you must mean, like, the way Facebook is aggressively going after Clearview for violating its terms.
Comforting.
3
Thankfully this will never work in Europe. Facial recognition information is classed as sensitive personal data under GDPR, which is subject to the same rules as medical records.
Clearview would not be able to justify such broad an indiscriminate collection of data under the law, and, even if they somehow could, the Right to be Forgotten would enable anyone to have their data removed (though likely most people wouldn’t make such a request, through ignorance, laziness, or both).
Furthermore, they are probably already running afoul of GDPR. If they scraped the entirety of Facebook, they have undoubtedly captured millions of EU citizens’ sensitive personal data. And I can’t imagine, given how many people hide their location on Facebook, that they can truly identify a photo’s origin. The net result being that the EU could legally, entirely obstruct the use of any of Clearview in Europe.
As an aside, while it may not be government-sponsored, this looks like a privatised version of China’s state surveillance operation. How long before we also get a private company providing social scores?
I’m thankful for the EU’s correct treatment of privacy as a fundamental human right—under the UN’s own definition of human rights—and I hope the American people and its lawmakers have the sense to follow suit.
13
We look at totalitarian regimes and are horrified about their methods to repress people by flagging their identities if they do not comply with an overall ideology. This solution puts this power into anybody´s hands. If we allow this, our democracies are dead. It´s more than frightening.
14
Technology will always expand the bounds of criminal law enforcement. Finger printing, DNA and other forensic methods have helped solve a significant percentage of crimes otherwise deemed impossible.
Ask the right questions and the only people against the use of this technology would be criminals or their handouts and handouts.
1. We could possibly identify the person who burgled your home. Do you approve?
2. We may be able to find the rapist of your daughter.
3. We can find who mugged you.
Just because the technology is currently not 100% accurate could result in false matches doesn't mean it cannot be employed. Wrong matches would be very quickly eliminated from consideration based on other data from the crime and/ or personal metadata. Technology will also improve to work better with persons of color, because doing so is in the best interest of the provider.
Congress must immediately pass laws to prevent misuse of the law by private companies and law enforcement agencies. Technology must be leashed, not killed. Criminals are getting smarter and making it harder to solve crimes. Law enforcement MUST not lag.
3
The problem is when wired in face recon, as offered by Clearview AI, is used to avoid punishment by those in positions of authority. Most would not begrudge the authorities using face recon if serious criminals were apprehended or serious crime avoided. But the other side of the coin attracts the darker side of human nature and these folks are very well positioned and very determined.
The current hard drug trade provides the perfect cautionary analogy for what this app will facilitate.
We often hear of drug busts wherein tens - and occasionally hundreds, of kilograms of heroin are seized but the fact remains that hundreds of kilograms would not cover the daily consumption of the US heroin addict population - let alone the annual consumption.
Every year the Cosa Nostra ships thousands of tons of "their stuff" into the US. Everyone in law enforcement knows it. Law Enforcement know the who, the why, how and when. A blind eye is turned and "their stuff" is allowed to pass. "Go along to get along- I hope you understand."
Clearview AI will simply automate and this arrangement, as well as any other nefarious activity, wherein 'ordinary' folks in authority and criminals can co-operate to make enormous amounts of money.
In other words it will get worse.
4
Asked about the implications of bringing such a power into the world, Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback.
"I have to think about that," he said.
It's always the case with these tech types isn't it? They become enamored and blinded by what they do, and never think about the consequences until it's far too late.
Seems to be the way it is doesn't it? And so society goes, blithely face first into future buzz saws.
John~
American Net'Zen
5
A few thoughts:
I am even more relieved now that I never had children; this is not the world I would have wanted to bring them into.
The term "ethics" comes to mind. Do Mr. Ton-That and Clearview AI have any? I'm reminded of the great truth: "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
How does this system work with identical twins?
The potential for abuse will make Trump's transgressions seem like child's play.
Even if one is not transgressing, technology like this will make it easy for it to seem that one is. Color me officially terrorized.
6
AI, without authorization/approval, should be sanctioned and precluded. And the entities that approve it without same, should be exposed to everyone else, so that they may be quickly identified, and receive the same reciprocal, public treatment!
2
For those who are wondering about the vast database of "3 billion" faces, I would submit to you an even larger database and one that uses a similar comparison. It's called TinEye, and it is supposed to spot identical or slightly-modified pictures. It has no facial recognition capabilities, but it is interesting in what it can do. (They claim 39.3 billion images)
YouTube also has facial recognition, because a party shown in a video can ask to be blurred out. I believe the blurring is done with a secret facial-recognition algorithm.
5
If the company is essentially pulling publicly available images from the internet, how is this different from a team of extremely hardworking detectives scanning through thousands of online images to identify a suspect? Of course, the usual detective work would still need to provide substantial evidence before they can put together their case. Pretty sure detectives who do that would get a medal if they end up catching the criminal.
5
It’s different in the way your hometown library is different from Google. How many times a day do you look something up on your phone? How much effort is it to go research something in the library. Same difference time wise, cost wise, etc.
1
@Jake I worked in another country long ago as an engineer for a very large state organization. one of the their research centers employed about 5,000 people. among these employees were physionomists who had been trained on the basis of a some photographs taken when we were hired. they were patrolling the site incessantly and only in the rare case where they could not identify you were you asked to produce your badge. They knew our complete names, the divisions where we were working etc. their "neural nets" were indeed finely tuned. The site was also nicely gated and barbed-wired...
The inventors and investors want to be rich enough that it doesn't affect them. Mega wealth buys freedom from oppression.
Bottom line is always the bottom, do unspeakable things to you and me and make a big profit.
5
Over forty years ago, in Cambridge, MA, I worked in a university lab to test automated pattern recognition algorithms to detect cancerous white blood cells. It took only fifteen minutes of training for me to identify the cancer cells. My job was to compare my results with the automated computer program. The experiment failed with my professor losing his quest for tenure.
Since that time, I worked in the defense industry with many opportunities to read about pattern recognition research. I participated in several projects to test automated pattern recognition algorithms for defense applications. Every algorithm in the literature and in my evaluations failed.
If you search online for cellular pattern recognition, you'll find a lot of journal articles promising a breakthrough but no successes announced. The search for this holy grail continues funded by regular research monies.
It's a lot easier to computer analyze a flat cellular image on a slide than to compare 3-D faces from different angles. Companies are secretive about their facial recognition research not because it works, but, because of its limitations. China is famous for chasing the chimera of facial recognition research not because it will work, but, because of its ability to scare its citizens into submission.
11
AI is now proven to be successful in reading chest X-rays as compared to radiologists. Still early days. Be patient. Maybe take another 10 years, but humans will eventually succeed in this technological challenge.
1
@Joel H
Beware of black box algorithms. First draft was successful, yes. Second draft was modified to highlight the cancerous portion of X-ray.
Then they found a funny thing: the algorithm had learned to look not for cancer but for the doctors handwriting on the X-ray. So they hadn’t actually solved the problem.
So it goes. You have to check your work. Go read the rules for passport photos, it basically says “we need the best possible photo to feed into our facial recognition software”.
4
Regardless. Are you saying that it can’t ever be done? Start reading up on Synthetic Biology. Biochemical mechanics are starting to read like machine language in computers did. So far no special sauce intimated at. Complexity upon complexity. Limits to human perception and intelligence. Another dimension to perceive? Quantum computers. Growing brains to integrate with computers or human brains. Early days. If current humanity does not become extinct soon, we’ll become masters of our own genetic evolution. 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Need to agree upon a new social contract. Cause no suffering? We are challenge driven like beavers to the sound of running water. Event horizon! Need to plan for a better society now before technology overtakes us.
Are you saying that it can’t ever be done? That’s been said before.
The scariest thing about this is that most people won’t care. Just like when we found out about Cambridge Analytica or when Snowden went public about the NSA. There was a momentary collective gasp, and then nothing. This is a big issue that I feel like only Wareen is even touching on. My data should be my property, and it definitely shouldn’t used for surveillance or finely-tuned propaganda! What are people thinking?!
23
Alarming points that I think many are overlooking: (1) this technology is being bankrolled by hard-right billionaires who apparently like the idea of imposing an authoritarian surveillance state AND (2) there exists a so-called “software bug” which allows specific people to be excluded from the app's all-seeing eye (as the article's author was, temporarily.) I wonder who is being granted permanent exemptions? We know that the very rich and the very influential already can have their properties erased from Google Maps and the tail numbers of their private jets obfuscated from otherwise-mandatory FAA tracking. Now it seems that privacy itself soon will be something possessed only by a privileged few “haves,” while the rest of us become continuously-surveilled “have-nots.”
23
I am saddened to witness the United States of America evolving into a second-rate, third-world country.
24
I'm glad he gave it directly to law enforcement. This is not a bad thing. Criminals should be caught and prosecuted, and this tool is a tremendous help.
2
@J. G. Smith
Wake up, J.G., before it's too late:
https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/
Yes, criminals SHOULD be caught and prosecuted, but HOW we catch and prosecute criminals matters a VERY great deal, J.G., wouldn't you agree? The existing laws of this country (USA) most certainly DO bear unambiguous witness that HOW we catch and prosecute criminals matters a VERY great deal (e.g. Search Warrants; Miranda Warnings; Rules of Evidence; etc.). So solemn is the design and implementation of our [admittedly imperfect] legal system, that criminals shown to have been apprehended and/or prosecuted in contravention to these laws (e.g. Search Warrants; Miranda Warnings; Rules of Evidence; etc.) must be released.
P.S. The developer doesn't "give" ANYTHING to law enforcement, J.G.. He SELLS access to his database for top dollar (prices start at $10,000 and ramp up rapidly beyond $250,000: see the graphic near the end of the article). And oh, by the way, the developer ILLEGALLY RETAINS COPIES all images uploaded to his server(s) by police agencies using his app, not to mention that the entire app image database is itself built upon the ILLEGAL harvesting (or "scraping" as it's called in the article) of images from social media accounts and other platforms across the internet WITHOUT OWNER OR SITE PERMISSION and in blatant violation of the Terms of Use of those platforms. Still think "this is not a bad thing?"
3
This guy is kind of a tech loser, willing to do anything for a taste of a little success, going where reputable firms and investors won't go. I'm not buying that their facial algorithm is very unique or sophisticated relative to those developed by the big tech players. It looks like his app and company could be easily shuttered due to lawsuits, which are no doubt coming.
11
This Genie is out of the bottle and no amount of public outrage and government intervention can put it back in. Just imagine facial recognition combined with surveillance videos, DNA and fingerprint databases, cellphone location tracking, bank and credit card records, tax returns, medicare records, electronic health records, motor vehicle data tracking . . . . All in real time.
As others have said, we're all Uighurs now.
7
Not so. We have laws and public accountability, and democracy. Let’s use them.
2
China and the US have taken the lead in AI research. They have to be watched very carefully, and regulated by some international organizations. The dangers of these technology, likely to be misused by the State, the police, military, secret agents, dysfunctional people, etc., are very high. Information can also be distorted at the highest level. An authoritarian government developing this technology (China), and a declining democracy doing the same thing (the US), is very dangerous to global independence, freedom and rights. It needs to be nipped in the bud. And it needs be highly regulated. How backward are people in these countries not to understand the dangers of these technologies?
19
China and the US have taken the lead in AI research. They have to be watched very carefully, and regulated by some international organization. The dangers of these technology, likely to be misused by the State, the police, military, secret agents, etc., are very high. Information can also be distorted at the highest level. An authoritarian government developing this technology (China), and a declining democracy doing the same thing (the US), is very dangerous to global independence, freedom and rights. It needs to be nipped in the bud. Or, banned all together. And it needs be highly regulated. How backward are people in these countries not to understand the dangers of these countries.
6
Remember technology is always a two edged sword. If law enforcement can use it to identify perps than criminals can use it to identify undercover cops, persons in witness protection, and spies in their midst. While catching a shoplifter is laudable placing other’s lives at severe risk is ridiculous. Pretty soon everyone will be wearing masks.
20
Well, as I said to my family, probably a good fraction of Americans thought this technology was already in use by law enforcement through years of TV shows like Bones, Criminal Minds etc. Also, as people who went through the US immigration system, the government has EVERYTHING on us - including fingerprints and iris scans for Global entry as we traveled for business extensively. People who were born here have less data in the system at this point but it's only a matter of time. It wasn't too long ago that I was reading that my phone location was available to many companies. The horse is not just out of the barn, it's in the neighbor's paddock.
7
@E Campbell
This is a good diversionary piece to make people feel 'better'.
Oh - see.... government isn't doing this yet.
Yeah. 'They' have been doing this for decades. You don't think the NSA and CIA are sharing their 'A List' tools with law enforcement in Podunk Idaho, do you?
By letting private companies do parallel work they can get a better end product.
2
Company's don't end privacy. Governments do.
5
Large companies and corporations have more power and are more dangerous than government in this country.
16
@Qui Tam Corporate irresponsibility can easily assist in that act. I'm shocked Mr. Ton-That was taken aback when asked what are the broader implications, as if he's never pondered that. And if he's really never wondered, I suggest he may be a sociopath; even more reason to be wary of people promoting such technology to government entities for profit.
7
The headline is inflammatory but the reality is no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street. People are just afraid of what they do not completely understand
3
And then, kind of like the impending tattoo removal growth industry, another industry of well functioning, comfortable disguise masks takes off too.
3
The dystopian world is already on first base and we ( the boomer generation) has seen freedom that will be remembered with a great dose of nostalgia.
While civil libertarians will rant and rave about violation of privacy it is a loosing battle against technologies which will gain wide spread use.
Bad actors will proliferate and we will see civil liberties slowly eroded to where we will all become automons to the hagemons of the emerging technology invasive world.
Welcome to the army of clones - it is just a matter a of a decade or two.
16
@Rh
We were on first base in 1962. Listen to Huxley's speech at UC Berkeley. He was astounded at how far we were along the road to 'A Brave New World' then, 31 years after his book was published. It's been another 68 years since his speech.
All it will take is another '9/11' event to provide the final excuse. Don't think something isn't waiting in the wings.
Personally I wonder if Trump is being used to start open conflict between the right and left. Government will jump in, remove him for inciting violence and impose a form of martial law to 'protect us'. Of course this will occur just before the next economic melt down. We don't want hungry unemployed people rioting in the streets, do we?
4
Soulless, greedy, and evil: technocapitalism at its best.
12
All the more reason not to use "social" media, to wipe your public profile, and to demand that Google take down any images you find of yourself. Get off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TimeSuck.
10
The potential for government abuse is still the greatest threat from the total surveillance now possible. What's to stop Trump, in his next term, from issuing an executive order to arrest anyone criticizing the administration, or worse, him personally when they are identified in this manner? Can't happen here, you say? Who can stop him then? Congress? Right.
12
@Islandflyer What's to stop a political opponent, say, of Trump from hiring an opposition researcher who fabricates evidence to create a dossier containing the fabricated evidence in order for the FBI to obtain a surveillance order from the FISA Court against a US citizen who has committed no crime? If opposition research dossiers can be fabricated by Democrats and used by the FBI in warrant applications against Republicans, could the same thing happen with facial recognition technology?
Pervasive surveillance and the pending cashless society will put paid to human anonymity, privacy, sovereignty, bodily and mental integrity, and freedom. Is this human life?
7
Reminds me of the movie Brazil.
Any chance this is the 'public' arm of the NSA? This sounds like an almost unbelievably impressive feat for a few engineers.
3
Ironic that the same man who decided against becoming a model and selling his own image, has commercialised everyone else’s face. Despicable.
8
Remember the movie, “Minority Report”? We’re there.
6
we are all Uighurs now.
13
To all the people who say they have nothing to hide: your comfortable life is only possible because of the rule breakers and radicals of the past who were deemed deviant or criminal or a threat by the powers of the day and so had a very legitimate reason to operate and organize privately. It is happening today with the protests in Hong Kong and its mirror opposite of the rigorously surveilled Uighurs, people whose lives have been robbed because of their religion and difference. Which world do you want?
18
Among other Pandora's boxes soon to be unsealed - what would (ahem, will) happen when a criminal investigation involves identical twins? Strangers who are sheer doppelgängers for one another? People who have undergone extensive facial cosmetic (or post-accident, reconstructive) surgery? The ethical irresponsibility of releasing this app for *profit * is sickening.
15
@ Mildred — The case of identical twins being involved in a criminal investigation thanks to technology has already happened. There was a recent news story about a case where a man was arrested and charged with sexual assault, based on a law enforcement search of a civilian DNA database (one of those used for familial/genealogy research), but it was later determined that he had an identical twin, who shares his DNA and who committed the crime.
1
A messy and meandering comment: What role would this tech have played in the confirmation of Brett Cavanaugh? How would it influence your career? How does the 21st century private & public sector surveillance matrix/product menu influence our behavior? How will it? Another solution for another “problem”.. $ to be made on all of these ‘after the fact’ solutions. Meaningless and loneliness? SoMe. Who am I? DNA testing. Obesity? Pill. Appearance? Surgery. Mass shooters? Drills and lockdowns.... But prevention? Seems to be based on fear, not doing the right thing. Fear of being found out, fear of higher insurance premiums, fear of losing a job or not getting hired, fear of being open... We are so incredibly on the wrong track. That’s the real problem. What do we want? Family? Peace? Healthy Planet? Less traffic? An End to poverty? Or do we really just care about ourselves? Prevention is the answer to the real problems on Earth. But not prevention based on fear and hiding oneself - behind lawyers, money or dropping out of society - or behind one’s SoMe identity. Effective prevention comes from within. From self-control and self-monitoring based on what we are capable of as human beings. Tech can help. But we don’t need it to make us more advanced and more capable of being GOOD- we need to value goodness. Practice and practice again being good. Like every worthy aim, goodness requires good leaders and teachers, hard work, humility, faith/confidence and failure.
7
I seriously detest the young man that decided this was how he would use his talents to make his fortune. Declaring someone else will do the same, so I’ll get mine is no excuse. People have a right to privacy, and it’s quite apparent this will be used for all sorts of evil purposes. Reading this makes me fear our society has begun waltzing with a truly dystopian future.....
14
Todd, your government makes this guy look
like the worm he is! It has server farms the size of cities and it doesn’t use them to discover the end of computing pi 3.14...;it uses them to discover the bad guys out of all of the realtime data available from everywhere including your data and my data! The question is: what is a bad guy and who defines it?
In China, it’s being used to strip individuality to create the cookie-cutter worker; anyone not conforming is collected. processed, retrained and reinstalled into the system.
All this NYT article is doing is informing us what already has been going on, in a way our peanut-sized brains can process.
1
Of course there should be concern. It is almost axiomatic though that the greatests threats of any type will come from the direction least expected, While everyone focuses on FB Google and the like, its almost a given that the game changer could be a pimple encrusted teenager with resentment against the world. As others here have noted, if you don't protect your privacy including your picture then you have no one really to blame.
4
People plaster their faces and their lives all over social media, then profess to be worried about their privacy. Please. You took the bait, so don’t complain when you’re dinner.
9
@Chris
Just to be FAIR, Chris, some of us responding here have NEVER "posted our faces or our lives all over social media." I have not. And I am not alone in having not done so. I have NEVER owned a FaceBook; Instagram; or Twitter account in my life. Yet, I still worry (about cyber-security). I remain at risk (and apps like "Clearview" amplify this risk). This still concerns me. As it should.
I DO have a driver's license with my photo, some personal (biometric) details, and my physical home address, all of which have been digitally captured and stored by the issuing DMV in my state, and for which I am NOT permitted to "opt-out," modify, edit, or withhold (as is the same case for the majority of working Americans today). I DO have a bank account and, like most, I DO use credit cards (try renting a car, or an overseas hotel or plane ticket, without one -- sometimes possible but rarely sensible and never easy). I'm also required by my employer to display a company-issued photo ID card on my person at all times while on-duty, on-site and off. Of course, I DO own and use a cell phone and a laptop computer daily, too.
All of these "necessary presences" or activities in our lives carry with them some very real degree of RISK. We are ALL exposed to such risk and we are ALL vulnerable to victimization of various kinds every single day, Chris (though perhaps not all equally so), NOT just those who've chosen to "plaster their faces and their lives all over social media."
7
@Chris
Strolled down any sidewalks lately?
2
Just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should.
11
Here is your business plan, future owner of your own Hawaiian or Phillippine island:
design a way to erase a clients' image and info wherever and whenever you wish.
7
The people who shared images on Facebook (a platform which, apparently, doesn’t really mind illegal scraping) were thrown under the bus.
And the people whose faces were unknowingly included — as background extras — in those photographs? They’re probably livid.
I suspect Clearview’s founders are probably going to be very familiar with the face of at least one federal judge.
6
@Publius I'm livid.
Give or take 36 years, it’s happening.
1
Someone will invent synthetic mask that I can change out everyday, put makeup on and have a different look every time I go out, or a holographic block that keeps that despicable software from scanning me. There will be profitable work arounds and we will ask just like with virus protection programs, "which came first, the virus , or the virus protection software?" In this case we will have to start paying for our privacy, it is a disgusting thing. On a side note, this reminds me, has anyone checked to see if Trump is making money in the stock market with all the crazy world /event manipulation? Are his cohorts making money off of it?
7
Is Thon-That really the person behind this or is he just a model hanging around San Francisco who was picked to make it seem like one whiz kid thought it up? Because there are some pretty influential people here working with a guy who dropped out of Australia.
6
Shouldn't there be lawsuits and congressional hearings on this? A cop with a history of domestic violence could use this to stalk his ex wife. Celebrities and public officials could get stalked. What about those newly elected women at the Women's Marches across the country? What about gun control activists? What about anti-abortion protesters? (Do you really think you're going to be safe conservatives?) We should all be concerned. Plus what if the app misidentifies Blacks and/or Asians?
4
@Letitia Jeavons Yes, there should be, but look who's in charge. The way you describe it, at least we'll all be equal. Maybe this awful innovation will narrow what divides us. I hope something does. Btw, are you ready for eye-tracking computer displays that records your eyes looking at your ipad or pc? They have lots of teeny cameras embedded in them so even attempts at disguise are impossible (as with facial recognition, supposedly). Seriously, they're billed as a boon to paralytics but they're coming soon to a computer you might buy in the next few years. It's all pretty disgusting.
1
This could be a fabulous solution for everything crypto and securitized token. One of the main reasons crypto and tokens are not taking off in the US is because of money laundering. This tool could help to white-label "good" investors.
For thousands of years nearly everybody knew everyone else in town by their face. Not only did they know their name, they knew your parents, your grandparents, etc... this expectation of anonymity is pretty new.
3
@Gavin Greenwalt But that same person could move twenty miles away and be completely anonymous.
I worked in a company that scraped web pages. Companies that did not want their data mined, like Facebook and Twitter, had strict policies in their terms of service agreements against taking their data, including criminal penalties. Using their site implied that you agreed to be bound by their terms. We steered clear of them.
It appears Clearview ignored those policies, which makes their database of pictures stolen property. Any decent defense attornies should be able to ask in discovery for the sources of the pictures used to identify their clients. If they were identified using stolen property, the prosecution is using fruit of the poisoned tree. Case dismissed.
There is no technical reason why anyone with sufficient skill can't scrape any information they want from any web site, just as there is no technical reason someone can't shoot a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue. There are laws that specify consequences for both crimes. This company should be shut down, or restricted to using publicly available data.
14
Here is what I know about facial recognition -- it continues to mistake me for someone else.
When this technology is permitted to thrive in an unfettered capitalistic environment we will all be the poorer for it.
13
I would like to invest in an invisibility cloak startup. I want to remain a private citizen but this seems to be increasingly impossible.
21
motorcycle helmet 24/7
5
A your information, very web search, very email you’ve ever done is in data. Google, Facebook, your streaming services, health care providers,credit bureaus and ion and on. Ancestry.com is a stupid thing to do and you don’t own your info. Cambridge analytics marches on.
Zuckerberg. Bezoar sell us out.
5
The risk for false positives has to be very real for these systems. I get that they can produce results but with 7 billion faces, all of similar size, it seems entirely possible for multiple individuals to have the same measurement profiles. Even if the program scanned for 20 separate vectors (which I believe is far more than it does) it would be like if every computer password had 20 characters but only six letters (I’m assuming something like 1/4” increments) to chose from.
My math is rusty but in such a situation you could expect a perfect match at least once every 29 million people. If less vectors are measured or the variability is less (and it probably is) the odds for a match increase.
Also, why almost zero black people in the photo illustration?
4
I hope Mr. Ton - That is such a savage to release this software to the public, we are gonna see amazing things.
Can you believe looking anywhere on the internet of pictures of politicians and people in power?
I’m wondering what kind of things can come out, or perhaps these people are then gonna stop it and ban it when it leads their privacy? :)
2
@Michele that would be fun to watch. Reality TV: level - 600. Ready or not for thruth- buckle up. Fun for couple of months, and then humanity will be finally nauseated, throwing technology into a bottom of the ocean so it dissapears like Atlantis.
1
People have been presenting their faces to other people in public for eons; the only difference is now a computer is also watching. It is a change of degree, not kind. London's financial district was been wired with thousands of cameras for almost two decades. No burst of crime followed. Besides, using facial recognition to commit a crime is already a crime. More likely, it will catch "porch pirates" (people who steal packages off stoops) and other malefactors. A Ring camera already caught two thieves breaking into cars one street over from me. Criminals have no right to privacy in public or else they would sue over Wanted posters. As for the rest of us, what could the software possibly find? People lying about why they are late for work or canoodling with a non-spouse? Those people will do what people in small towns (where everybody knows your face) already do -- be more discreet. Hardly sounds like 1984.
3
As someone who believes she has nothing to hide, I have never been bothered by the idea of facial recognition. But recently, Facebook has been asking me if I want to tag certain photos. I have answered yes. Several times, Facebook has asked me if I want to tag MY OWN PHOTO with the name of a Facebook friend who is NOT ME. I am now extremely worried about facial recognition.
6
@Bella In a recent test of Amazon’s facial recognition technology they uploaded pictures of all the members of congress and compared them to mugshots. It falsely identified 28 congress members as criminals. The technology is less accurate for faces of racial minorities and women, so those populations are more likely to get mid-identified.
A group of tech companies and universities wrote a letter to facebook imploring them to not sell their technology to law enforcement because of the likelihood of false accusations against innocent people and the disproportionately higher chance of that happening to women and minorities.
12
Why are you so sure the identifications were false? I seem to recall that a certain majority leader of the Senate recently falsely swore to render impartial judgement in an upcoming impeachment trial... ;)
1
And while we stare in awe at China’s use of AI for totalitarian purposes, the same technology is available in the West. Democracy and the heralded ethics of the west will not protect us from the fate of our Chinese counterparts. Please say that’s not true.
7
I typically take the Jeopardy test, to no avail, when offered annually, at least until last year when I did not agree with their requested submission information. For some strange reason they started asking for pictures when taking the try-out quiz. I can certainly understand if one passed the try-out and perhaps the picture was to be used for an id badge for an in-studio appearance, but the try-out??? Jeopardy/Sony was merely doing what the "in thing" is and didn't bother to question the need for the additional and needless information grab. I'm sure a Gen X intern likely got a bonus for the idea, but it only leads to more and more demands for information that simply isn't relevant . . . just because. This cause extra information request begs the question: What exactly are they going to do with the photos, now and for perpetuity?
8
Of course "Facebook knows"! Thiel has a serious conflict of interest as a board member of Facebook who's investing in a company which is based on acquiring Facebook's data by scraping and violating terms of Facebook. Isn't he required to enforce the rules of the company, as a board member?
The problem is, those who are setting and enforcing the rules are also those who are profiting from breaking them. There are no rules!
32
Interesting timing for me, seeing this article the day after an incident at Whole Foods on Union Square. I was grabbing up a few things before an appointment, wearing my sunglasses, when a rent-a-cop asked me to remove the shades. When I asked why, he said “we like to see our customers’ faces.” Excuse me?? Are they using facial rec to create a database of shoppers, for no good reason I can think of?
I dropped my shopping basket, turned and walked out, never to return. I don’t buy anything on Amazon because of their strident anti-union stance and their poor treatment of their employees, plus their strong arm tactics of trying to bully NYC for billions in tax breaks, while Jeff Bezos counts his own billions.
It’s time to stand up to these despicable tactics and bullying practices, at least in my own small way, (Yeah, I’m aware that Bezos owns Whole Foods personally, that it’s not part of Amazon).
52
This makes the East German Stasi look like a pre-school art project. Hitler, Stalin and their ilk would have had a field day with this technology. How quickly the lessons of the last century have been lost. And we want to abolish the 2A? Not if, but when the jack booted thugs come knocking at your door look back at your own blissful ignorance and naïveté to blame because all you’ll have is your proverbial “Richard” in your hands.
14
Hey there law enforcement officer! You are being replaced by a computer. Clearview is computerizing the job of the policeman. They are starting with facial recognitiion. But they have plans to recognize hands and other body parts. They will link your hands to you personal data, too. Tracking criminal behavior is just the start. They plan to track all kinds of behavior. Your neurosis, and table manners too, will become part of your identity. And you Luddites, who happen to read this, you will be identified by the same digital codes. And it won't work to post contrived photos of yourself on Internet sites. We are all in checkmate!
17
Joseph Weizenbaum wrote 280 pages for people to understand what's AI and why a lot of features of AI OUGHT NOT be used.
He was a jew who could flee Germany before you know what. So he's one who can write and speak ethics about AI and algorithms…
5
This is the reason I don't post a photo on my FB, Linkedin or any other social network. Instead I use a drawing.
3
Simple solution: don't post images of yourself online. Seems rather narcissistic to do so anyway.
5
@Bill White maybe if you’re over the age of 40. Social norms change. Professional expectations change. It’s standard practice, not narcissistic, to post a headshot to LinkedIn at the least, and recruiters will often look to Twitter and Facebook profiles to evaluate potential candidates. This is how the game is now played.
3
Authoritarianism in a nutshell. China is already well down this road. Democracy is an afterthought in a free-for-all, bought-and-paid-for society.
7
Not Good!
7
It was inevitable. It’s only the beginning.
Brave New World... 1984.
We now have a tool that obliges the conscience.
Jeffrey Epstein’s pilots will be known. Running Florida trailer camps to hire the impoverished by paying off their single mothers will no longer be an anonymous venture.
Every iPhone with a camera may become vulnerable. Your household or office computer, the same.
We have automobile pictures to assure tolls... now we will have the drivers. Easy Pass will bring all sorts of questions.
The Lincoln and Holland Tunnels will use this.
Airport technology will create the permanent record.
Privacy was a right. It is no more.
Mustafa Mond is running the show... and dress rehearsal is over.
7
Did Ton-That overstay in the US? You don’t just move to the US from Australia. You need a work visa, which he wouldn’t be able to get as a college dropout. And he sure isn’t O visa material.
13
Next up, Russian hackers access and download Clearview's algorithms and database.
"Facial-Recognition Start-Up Offers Credit Monitoring After Massive Data Breach." Coming soon to a headline near you.
6
The harm being done right now by Clearview AI and the extraordinary potential for catastrophic destruction of privacy and civil rights in the United States demands that this company and its principals be shut down – immediately. When you see names like Richard Schwartz and Peter Thiel, you know we]re in trouble.
11
The bigger question is did Jessica Medeiros Garrison monetize her connection(s) as the Executive Director of the Republican Governor’s Association to push government entities to buy the Clearview AI technology?
Ms. Garrison’s former law firm Bradley Arant Rose and White (BAR W) now known simply as “Bradley” has had strong ties as the “Go To” law firm in Alabama. Ms. Garrison’s former boss at Bradley and at the Alabama Attorney Generals Office was Luther Strange. Strange used his connections to have Her appointed as ED of RAGA.
2
Peter Thiel is such a thin skinned hypocrite. He harassed Gawker into bankruptcy for shining the light on his personal life, not that anyone even payed attention to any stories about him, but turns around and backs this kind of extraordinarily intrusive surveillance.
22
The reality is that facial recognition technology doesn't really change much except for the speed at which agencies can find someone. As scary as all this may seem, it's not like it hasn't been in use in some form or another already. If you have a driver's license or passport, you're already in the database. The only difference is that now the public is doing the work for "Big Brother" by constantly updating their online personas with their most recent pictures, always having their location notifications in use, and never actually realizing that the power, in truth, lies in the hands of the consumer.
The solution is simple, stop using the services. But the question remains, are people willing to sacrifice likes on photos of their cats and dogs for a greater sense of privacy?
3
All due respect to Mr. Thon-That, if he can do this, imagine what the teams at Google or Facebook or the NSA or the Kremlin can do, and are probably already doing
8
The excellent quality of the watermarks of the Dutch personal identity papers and the excellent registration of where everyone lived and what their faith was caused disaster when the system fell into the hands of the murderous Nazi regime. Reading about these new systems always gives me the chills. The resistance fighters of the future will not be printing false papers in basements, but will be hackers. God bless them in the future.
7
That's not me officer, that's my twin, Skippy.
5
How about we put the police who chose to use this in jail? There seems that there's no accountability once you are an LEO.
2
Terrifying....Google trying to access everyone's health records and this face recognition.
4
While I was reading this article, my spouse asked me if I wanted to go out for dinner and then see a movie afterward.
After a moment's thought I said no.
5
Please, let’s all share this article on Facebook and other social media. Email it to friends and family. This is ....disturbing!
2
Technology is going to move forward no matter what.
That’s why it’s more important than ever to ensure we have a strong rule of law and constitutional rights.
That’s what at stake with a law breaker like Donald Trump. You want dystopia? Allow a political figure absolute authority to run people down he or she does not like. Give them high tech and your great grandchildren will be slaves.
8
It all sounds absolutely horrible...on the other hand, it may, out of fear, put us all on our best behavior.
1
Unless people start voting...
3
This is now the new normal if your vain enough to put your photo out there, I do understand, I mean how can you cheat the planet out of seeing what you look like. Time to pay the bill beautiful!
Too late - we are doomed
2
This brings to mind the movie "Minority Report", where you can't walk in public without being identified every step of your journey.
4
Thinking some sort of low-tech mask for public wear will soon come into vogue.
326
Ha, good idea, except when a rent-a-cop in Whole Foods asks you to remove your mask (or sunglasses, in my case) because they “like to see their customers’ faces”. Facial rec gone amok. There is no privacy left.
38
@Rob Kaufman Seriously? I hope you refused!
19
@Blue Couple There are already glasses that put an electronic jamming effect in front of one's face. A bad sign that we must go to such lengths to protect ourselves from the corporate surveillance state.
41
Peter Thiel: Total liberty for me. Zero liberty for you.
9
the blithe naivete on display in this thread is the real threat
2
The easily lulled took at officially ADMITTED uses of facial rec and see nothing but positives.
But EVERY bit of software EVER developed has been turned to anti-humanitarian uses and certainly always will be.
If this particular designer crosses one of the already-committed power seekers in western society, he'll wake up ''disappeared'' one morning like Vince Foster, Jeffery Epstein, or Seth Rich.
But if these software tools become casually used by an ever-growing national government, it will be a big tep toward the next revolution, no matter which national we're talking about.
People refuse to be owned or played.
1
If a tiny company with a handful of employees can do this, then any tech company, country or group of university researchers can do this. The barn door has been open for some time. If there is a solution, it will require more, not less technology.
2
@Michael No good without a conscience.
2
This ties it all together. It was only a matter of time. We keep getting closer and closer to a dystopian society. Many people would gladly accept this technology because they feel its price is worth it for the feeling of safety and security it brings them. Imagine being able to identify any image captured on your security camera? But beware, this technology will surely turn on us all.
2
@Felix ---- ASnd because the Internet has no fen ces, you'll probably never know who detroyed your serene life or even where they are.
Similarly wide ranging surveillance exists in China, used to target Uighur and other minority groups. It is dangerously naive to think these technologies won't erode norms everywhere. Officials must act now to prevent a massive disaster that will destroy our freedoms.
The libertarian leaning promoters only show how irresponsible they are. Big Tech is clearly motivated by big money. Data like this can become a tool for control as well as profit. Facebook appears to be complicit, at least in turning a blind eye. For the near term, legal safeguards should be mandated that ensure that no police department can misuse the data and none of this is sold to foreign nations. Trolling through these images without a specific court order is only one concern.
One could embrace radical transparency as liberating... A form of nudism... but this is naive. This technology is not meant to enhance our freedoms.
5
The comments here all seem to be forgetting about the existence of other technology, specifically the ability to create fakes. Photos and videos. This technology exists now and only will get better. With everyone relying on digitized records it will only get easier to to fake and alter things. While I expect facial recognition will help in minor crimes, those big criminal industries are likely to employ even more tech people. Think everything from on line scams, identity theft, drug cartels etc. And as for governments, police etc - how will they resist the temptation to "keep us safer" by tacking "trouble makers" etc. Leading to setting up opponents etc. Already there is the fake photo of Obama and the Iranian leader being bandied about. People may take facial recognition as proof but "proof" will be also easy to manufacture.
12
A company revealing the identity of everyone else, likes to keep its own identity secret!
10
Didn't this guy need a patent to do this? How could it have been such a secret, not needing government input?
It scares me to even think it about!
5
When I created my fake FB name, friends and family thought I was being paranoid. Then FB went off the rails, privacy-wise. Boy was I glad I set it up before they required real names. I was vindicated. Now this? Major vindication. Using your real name ANYWHERE online is a mistake.
12
I’m glad that Facebook turned me down
because I needed to be invited and because I was too old. Somehow life has gone on. I foresee very serious problems for people who are in the US illegally and who are seeking employment or are already working. Will laws in Sanctuary States protect them? What will happen to wrongdoers when hospitals, schools, and employers readily access a person’s true identity?
3
@Bike Fanatic
FB has all your IP addresses. They know exactly who you are. They've sold your data along with that of everyone else who uses the site.
Unless you're a shut-in, you've probably also had your image recorded countless times by security cameras and camera phones.
4
This one is tough. Nothing is private any more.
It really bothers me when Facebook or Google use my personal information for commercial advertising and marketing without my explicit permission.
It is equally disturbing that the New York Times records every article on their web site that I read without my explicit permission. Who knows what they do with this information; though the Times argues heavily for transparency by others, the paper doesn't always seem to practice what they preach.
I am very upset that the major cell phone service providers sold real time location data on everyone with a cell phone to third parties without permission, which they did until about a year ago. (They claim to have stopped. Maybe.)
But I also worry about being the victim of violent crime, so I'm willing to give law enforcement a bit more slack than I'm willing to give Facebook or Google. I don't want the police to track me down for parking on the wrong side of the street, but going after perpetrators of violent crimes perhaps is OK.
Perhaps.
Congress really needs to stop ducking this issue, and address it publicly and forcefully head on, and maybe society can find a reasonable compromise with reasonable safeguards. It won't be easy.
11
This is one of the many reasons why I ask people who take pics of me not to upload it to their social media accounts. They usually oblige, but only after looking at me like I'm crazy or even argueing with me over it even though there's *nothing* wrong with making that simple request. I don't have any social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter and have never uploaded a pic of myself to any websites due to complete distrust.
What makes me angry is that there's things beyond my control and my pic still might be sitting on some servers in God knows where.
11
So what does the future hold for us? Will everyone wear “digital” masks that hide their faces the moment they leave their homes? Or do we wear disposable masks that we change every day when outside?
Something tells me that somewhere in tech, people are working to frustrate AI’s big brotherness. If you doubt me, just ask the Pentagon. They have built many an unstoppable weapon only to rapidly be frustrated by countermeasures.
Lastly, with people like Trump and Barr in government, we should all fear for our futures.
5
@Mark Young
As if Obama was any different concerning this.
2
And of course this will go unregulated like the rest of tech. We all fell in love with technology but no one bothered to consider what all this wonderful stuff might ultimately be used for. And so here we are.
7
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." 4th Amend., US Const.
The right to be secure in your person against unreasonable searches and seizures.
I submit that venturing out in the world, be it physically or digitally (and really, what's the difference?) is not a waiver of your right to be left alone.
13
@Phil Hurwitz Read the August memo that the company provided to law enforcement agencies. They argue person “has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third
parties. (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) and that remains true “even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose. United
States v. Miller (1976). The government “ is typically free to obtain such information .. . without triggering Fourth Amendment protections.
I.e they state that since all the content they gather is publicly available, they are not protected by the 4A.
1
@JustAnotherPerson search and seizure is an evolving concept. . .and based in large part upon what society views as a reasonable expectation of privacy.
For example, there was a time when there was no expectation of privacy in a phone conversation taking place in a public phone booth. (Katz v US, 1967).
The NYT article raises an existential question. When it comes to government surveillance, your "person" is not the the same thing as a telephone number (Smith v Maryland), or a check that is later deposited in a bank (US v Miller).
You carry a tracking beacon around with a camera, a microphone and much of your most personal information on it. You post photos of yourself and your people all over social media along with mountains of other personal information. You happily send your DNA off to ancestory.com and 23andme so you can brag that you’re 27% Irish, or you are a distant ancestor some celebrity. You dox your fellow Americans because you disagree with what they say, or their politics, but claim to be offended when it happen to you or are required to provide basic ID to vote.
Nobody is taking away your privacy, you are giving it away. Problem isn’t loss of privacy, it’s internet anonymity. You want anonymity for you, accountability for those people. Oh, yeah you first....
16
Ultimately, this is about power and control.
We have law enforcement agencies using data matching technology to apprehend petty criminals in seconds at the same moment our laws seem meaningless against a criminal president's relentless dismantling of democracy.
It seems obvious this technology will advance beyond crime-solving to be weaponized against dissent, if it hasn't already.
8
Just like, “Minority Report” a movie, about identifying criminals and their crimes before they happened.
1
"While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.
* * *
Mr. Ton-That … said my photo had rung alarm bells because the app 'flags possible anomalous search behavior' in order to prevent users from conducting what it deemed 'inappropriate searches'."
Let me get this straight. Law enforcement runs your pic through the app. Clearview sees this activity, recognizes the face as that of a reporter that's been calling, and deduces that LE is running these searches as part of your investigative reporting, rather than bc it thinks you're a suspect. Ton-That then claims its app flagged your searches as possibly anomalous.
How exactly would its app have legitimately flagged LE's searches for your images? Has it pre-classified people as "possible perps" and "OK!"? Or does it simply use its app on a regular basis, or as needed, to pursue its own self-interests?
Interesting, too, that Ton-That feels entitled to sit in judgment on law enforcement. Silly me, I thought that was why we have judges, magistrates, prosecutors and elections.
16
...So yet again technology that can do incredible damage is based on money, not logic. This tech will be stolen, converted into a black market commodity, and people will get hurt. In an incredibly stupid, corrupt society, anything can be a weapon. As usual in politically psychotic countries, there are no laws to make usage of this tech accountable. As a tool for dictatorships, it's likely to be a must-have. Clearview will have a lot of blood on its hands, and soon.
6
It's the Netflix show "Black Mirror" becoming reality.
7
@Diane
or the machine/Samaritan from (POI) Person of Interest
Can we get some more information about this?!
"... Mr. Ton-That demonstrated the app on himself....The app pulled up 23 photos of him. In one, he is shirtless and lighting a cigarette while covered in what looks like blood."
5
To quote the late Dr. John -- "If I don't do it, somebody else will".
The very fact that one small startup can do what Mr. Ton-That has done demonstrates that the cat is already out of the bag. Our dilemma is how to manage the implications of technology like this, not whether or not it should exist.
If it's any consolation, the invention of the printing press surely provoked similar fears. It took about 300 years for the founders to explicitly codify what could and could not be printed.
We should expect a period of challenge and upheaval while we figure out how to adjust to this new technology.
My first thought is to create a startup offering rubber masks to match any desired person's face -- sort of a neo-hijab.
It is certainly true that this technology shatters our quaint notions of privacy while in public. I actually suspect that that horse also left the barn a very long time ago.
As "Half Sour" offers downthread, the liberal arts are CRUCIAL to understanding what to do next. This is a philosophical, rather than technological, question.
7
This article's central premise is disinformation, a "big lie". Privacy rights are already gone, and dystopia has already been baked in; this ship has already sailed. The partnership between Government and private mega-corporations, forged to evade law, oversight, and the Constitution, has already assembled the dossier on you. Pervasive mass surveillance, information warfare, and the technology to monitor, investigate, disrupt, and neutralize anyone it deems an "actual or potential threat" are already active in the US, EU, China and Russia. Have you really not been paying attention or are you just still in denial? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobmorgan/2014/08/19/privacy-is-completely-and-utterly-dead-and-we-killed-it/#68aa61e331a7
6
@Fran Cisco or perhaps it's both inattention and denial. Wasn't too long ago Edward Snowden was dismissed over his concerns/warnings.
1
“Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother.”
Facial recognition is described as “facecrime” in the dystopian & Orwellian world of “1984”: “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime."
261
@I Gadfly
What does that have to do with reality in 2020?
3
@David H
...if you have to ask, David, then you really don't get it. You're already inside the machine (just like most of us).
28
@I Gadfly
What is Sin is, What is not Complete, What is an Approximate, What is not Correct, or Correctly understood, applied, or formulated. Facial Recognition is 98% correct Statistically, Facial Recognition does not work on Round Dark Faces.
2
Yeah like we know how " so called Honest " law enforcement isn't .
1
Am thinking that Mr. Ton-That doesn’t post every single vacation picture of himself or his kids on Facebook. And I seriously doubt he’s on Instagram eating at a 5 star restaurant with photos of his food. So to all of you who live your lives publicly documenting all the minutia of your lives; surprise!!!!
4
Share Giuliani's, Schwartz's and Thiel's faces and mobile numbers...
It's all 'social' right?
3
I think there's only one person over 60 in this montage. H'mmm...
2
"Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy .... When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named 'John Good,' turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name."
Is he even aware of the irony?
Mr. "Good" (haha; shades of "Don't Be Evil") should be required to post close-up, high-resolution naked photos of himself on every social media platform and updated daily -- preferably after having been tarred and feathered.
4
An intelligent system targeting known threats instead of TSA security kabouki sounds good to me.
1
I’ve got the solution to this. All of us(at least the women) will start wearing burkas in public! No way they can ID us then! Whoever would have thought we’d be driven to such measures in order to retain a modicum of privacy?
3
Sounds like an opportunity for plastic surgeons.;)
4
Seems built for creeps perving on others.
3
Imagine someone taking your picture, using this tool to find your ID and home address, hacking into your security system and looting your home, all while you're out to lunch.
303
@JD Athey how would they find your home address? And what about people that aren't on social media?
5
@JD Athey
Imagine getting in your car, driving down the road, and getting hit by a dump truck.
With so many millions of targets to choose from, why would someone pick you?
9
@JD Athey Seems like a lot of work for someone.If that were a risk, people would figure out a countermeasure, just as they always have.
And they would have to carry all my stuff away and insurance would buy me new stuff.
2
I can only imagine the political havoc this is going to wreck when it becomes the criminal tool of choice to commit identity theft that targets senior citizens and ageing boomers.
1
"...scraped..."
tech nomenclature for "stole."
12
Hoan Ton-That pled naïve and said he hadn’t considered that his app might be used for nefarious purposes. Please. Am I really supposed to believe than an educated person clever enough to design such an app has no imagination? If so, these techies should be required to sit down with a creative writer to generate a list of potential misuses.
The first test of any new tech should be the WWHD test. What would Hitler do? Such facial skimming technology would have exposed thousands of Jews who went underground to live with Gentile neighbors. Many non-Jewish Germans took in the children of their Jewish neighbors and passed them off as their own. A photo skim revealing such a child at a seder or bar mitzvah posted on Facebook and the SS would have what they needed to haul the child off to the gas chamber.
The second test should be how would a criminal make money with it? Blackmailing that young gay politician who is in the closet and would pay money not to have a clearly identified photo of him walking into a gay bar?
The third test should be how often does it bring up false information? Many facial recognition programs still produce mismatches. What if the app matches your face to that of the next-door neighbor who’s a thief because you’re both young African American men of a similar height, build, and cut of hair?
We need transparency. We deserve to know what tech is out there and how it is being used. Then we can regulate and also push for modifications and/or bans.
6
“In 2017, Peter [Thiel] gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. 'That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company'.”
LOL, he has an equity interest -- owns shares -- in the company. Last I checked, being a shareholder counted as being "involved" in a company.
One has to wonder what percentage his shares represent.
4
It's time for someone to invent a pair of glasses you can wear and / or other apparel that can "de-pixel" light, if you will, i.e., scramble and distort any photo taken of you. End of facial recognition.
6
One simple question. How does this technology work if a man gets a fake tattoo on his face before committing a crime?
2
You should also blame people for exposing every minute of their private lives through Facebook and other social media apps. Narcissism seems to have a price, after all.
299
Except that even if you never had a social media account, you would likely appear in friends’ accounts, company websites and in other places. So unless you are a hermit, you are searchable.
57
@B
That does not make it right
Why is blame your go to place?
23
@B The police also use photos from drivers' licenses; someone outside law enforcement could devise a way of accessing those. As a result, you could lead a very private life away from social media and still be a victim of face recognition.
26
Hope it works better than Google's Image Search.
Try uploading a random image, something that hasn't been previously identified as the screaming-at-the-cat meme or Disney World's Polynesian. You'll get a bunch of random images with similar colors, shapes and backgrounds.
3
The opaqueness of the servers and their location, coupled with Facebook and other social media platforms seemingly very willing to allow photos on their sites to be scraped has totally taken down barriers among nations’ citizenry.
Suddenly, bad actors from across the globe can virtually stalk somebody without ever worrying about that person’s laws protecting them.
Someone defecting or legitimately seeking asylum is no longer safe and anonymous. I find this horrifying.
5
Ladies and Gentlemen: why the liberal arts are still important, Exhibit A.
4
I for one welcome our new machine overlords. Honestly who doesnt want these bad guys caught? Of course we all do. But at what cost in 10 years? Now is the time to discuss the pros and cons and suggest the appropriate limits - like mandatory DNA submission so that false identification doesn't happen!
Or who knows, maybe the sky isnt falling afterall Chicken little!
Seems like open revolution is our only hope of avoiding this future.
Sorry, but your face is public information. There is no invasion of privacy here. If you put your face on public websites like YouTube and Facebook, then you suffer the consequences. Especially if you are out committing crimes. I for one am glad law enforcement is using it to nab criminals. They get what they deserve.
@Dave I see your point and plan to install some security camera on my property to capture images of anyone prowling my car. But what if someone else puts your face out there; e.g., group photos, etc.? We're all caught up in the big tech drift net.
1
Nobody forces you to join Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media. Last I checked, you don't have to use your real name, real photos, or any other information about yourself on those sites either.
1
@Jim
If you walk outside, security cameras will record your face.
In the Jennifer Dulos case, the police used not only urban municipal security cameras in Hartford, but private homeowners' security footage in suburban areas like New Canaan and Farmington to track almost every step Fotis Dulos and Michelle Troconis took the day of the crime.
1
This another Zuckerberg in the making both in terms of their naivety and commercial potential
So hold back the discoveries of the Einstein’s, Oppenheimers, etc because Pakistan, Iran, and the likes can get a hold of the technology? Rear view driving is great until someone comes along to expose some fault.
Face it. The days of “privacy” as was known when there were barer bonds, secret bank accounts, and private phone numbers are over. Technology shouldn’t get the blame.
1
Disgusting. Everyone delete all contacts with social media.
5
Oh boy!
Here we go.
Phew!
Not too long ago actors, models and members of SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) whose images are used in print and broadcast art and advertising worked under a contract which specified # of uses and residual payments. Maybe they still do; I hung up my card years ago. The same was true for writers with works in print under contract. Now digital advertisers have "first amendment rights" that allow them to appropriate voices and likenesses pretty much with impunity. If that makes you ill, a physician who biopsies your tissue and subsequent research leads to a billion-dollar breakthrough of some kind, the same no-deal applies. I believe each person is a proprietary blend of the elements that make us human. When did we make the shift from individuals to subjects? Sure, if you download a "free" app, you're in fact the product. We need much more transparency and quantification of our, uh, contributions. And I hope there'll be more public coalescing around these issues. I think the world would be a better place if we could "opt in" instead of struggling to "opt out" of use by predatory businesses who have the means (thanks in no small part to all of us) to lobby for their right to "appropriate." When I put this question directly to high tech people (Facebook, etc.) at a conference, the answer was, "Well yeah, but then you'd lose functionality."
8
“Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people..."
The app developer did not invent anything. He makes use of technologies that are around for almost a decade. I bet foreign governments and any kind of rogue people used them well before the app was made public.
1
@D. Kireev See China. They've been doing this for quite some time.
2
One element missing from the discussion is the question of copyright of images. When this company accumulates it images from internet sources it is undoubtedly adding many images that are copyrighted to the database it is distributing to its paying clients.
I am a professional photographer with many copyrighted photographs of people -- mostly paid models -- for sale through photo agencies on the internet. If any of these images ended up in this company's database, I would consider that a violation of my copyright. Plus, the model releases I have for these photographs would not cover the distribution usage made by this company.
This is a whole new can of worms they are opening here.
10
This is already happening. Facebook and other social media are being mined by companies that provide profiles to police departments.
If you don't think that government isn't already doing this you are naive. I recall a CIA official saying that Facebook had done more than they ever could. People voluntarily provided more information about themselves than could be collected by any other means.
We are already a surveillance state with government doing all they can to collect data on every citizen. Government believes its function is not to serve and protect its citizens but to protect itself FROM its citizens.
Government has already conducted illegal surveillance - retroactively legalized. But it has been made clear that abuses continue. Our rights have been shredded.
Give it a little more time. Soon we will be living in Huxley's Scientific Dictatorship - willingly embracing our servitude (or living with Orwell's boot on our throat).
4
What's the next step?
Collecting the DNA from all human beings?
2
This is the human condition
It will be used for good and it will be used for evil.
The only thing I ask is that senior executives’ current location and bedroom conversations are consistently updated, recorded and publicly analyzed. Also, if they are watching our kids then they should lose custody of theirs until the behavior and the misconduct improves. Just a simple starting request before other steps are taken.
1
Asked about the implications of bringing such a power into the world, Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback.
“I have to think about that,” he said.
--------
Those are the scariest lines in the whole article.
19
@MJ And also the most di$ingenuou$.
11
As an EU citizen, we have GDPR to protect us from things like this via the right to be forgotten. I wonder if they have information on me and whether they would even abide by the law if I asked them to delete all my data. Or even if they are required to if they don't sell this data within the EU.
Also is scraping all this data from Facebook, YouTube etc. not stealing data from these companies? Even though it's publicly available surely theres a case that it's a valuable asset and stolen, at the very least against a EULA or terms of use.
So many questions arise from this, I'm glad it's part of a broader discussion on anonymity in public and privacy.
9
>Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
Thats it.
Thats the critical point.
Conservatives, broadly, are incredibly tech inept. A borderline Australian "tech guy" pitching this idea on Sand Hill road wouldnt make it past coffee
Yes. That includes Thiel, who does not personally do the work anymore, or does so rarely. He has a teams of people in SF, LA. And NY scouting investments for him
If you are desperate to get at least a small investment, pushing your idea to conservatives is a tried and true playbook
They are way more willing to fund far out tech or tech adjacent ideas than the general population or liberal investors.
It's interesting, you can sometimes see the desperation among very wealthy conservatives to get into this field directly, without going through the gatekeepers of the VC and investment firms.
They are already concerned about the ideologic disparity in tech. Not because they believe in censorship or any of that nonsense. They are alarmed because they see tens... possibly hundreds of thousands of multi millionaires being created at a 70:30 (or even 85:15) split between liberal/democrat and conservative/republican, Alarming numbers of which are moving out of New York and California and into nearby red & purple States.
They dont see consrvatives dominating the billionaire founders and owners like petrochemicals, energy, AG, construction, defense, pharma, insurance, etc.
2
Even if facial recognition systems have an enormous error rate (80%) as long as people think that the systems work, that will have a big effect. People in Hong Kong wearing masks, for example. Naturally, the government will say the systems work, since they paid a lot to some tech company.
1
“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
These kinds of blasé statements about the inevitability of the spread of this technology, the loss of privacy, pervasive surveillance, and the corrosive impact on rights and democracy (not to mention, its unreliability) need to be challenged at their every utterance. This is not where things should go — the direction of this tech is clearly dystopian and we all agree this is not the society we want to live in.
This is why we see triumph in the Hong Kong protesters when we saw them, covered in face masks, take down the lampposts with the cameras in them.
Banning this technology in the free world should be a no-brainer.
14
I'm surprised by the people who aren't alarmed by this. So you catch a criminal here and there. In exchange you lose ALL privacy. The only way this technology will not fall into the hands of people like the ones who spam your email, spoof your phone, ransomware your computer or business or church, etc., is for all images, vocal recordings, etc., to be protected by law and not be permitted to be taken and used without your permission.
For those thinking Yea police! What will you think when someone uses this or something like it to hunt for children, or blackmail you, or con your loved ones.
And as others have pointed out, if it isn't foolproof, you may be caught for something you didn't do.
They should call it Hubris
13
Forty years or so ago, there was a concept termed "appropriate technology." Deemed heretical by the techie and money folks, I'm sure. Never hear that term uttered anymore.
2
For any privacy law experts on this thread; regarding the recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), isn’t an image of your face considered ‘personal information’? If so doesn’t the Right-to-Know and Right-to-Opt-Out offer some protection to CA residents?
3
@Don, yes. The devil is in enforcement.
1
Within the last few months there was a news story about how the ACLU had police face recognition systems tested on congress members, local officials, etc. What came out of the experiment was that the face recognition system tagged about half of the politicians, etc, as felons. (What! only half? you may ask)
I thought the current state of the art for face recognition is about 80% error rate.
6
1984, anyone?
The technology will be perfected and deployed as widely as possible—surely to law enforcement and government, but also to criminals, ransomers, and blackmailers. The latter groups will almost certainly be better and faster at using it than the former.
Americans gave up claims to privacy a long time ago—viz: Alexa and Echo Dot among other things, products, and services.
Whether we can generate some semblance of protection against government overreach remains to be seen, but it will not happen with an authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist federal government like the one we have now.
Protections against the “bad actors?” Who can say??!!
2
What could go wrong? wrong? wrong? wrong? wrong?
Part of me wants the good this can do but part asks:
Where are the unintended side effects?
Remember when the Hoover FBI tracked Vietnam War Opponents and Nixon's enemies list?
There are other surprising forms of ID.
We recognized the FBI agents sneaking into our meetings by their shiny shoes and RayBans!
3
tbf, if I knew @kashhill was on MY trail, I would get agitated too, @nytimes.
Good heavens. While there might be some good for solving crimes; there are a whole lot more bad and frightening things here.
Could employers use this in hiring? If so most young people today who take pictures of everything will never get jobs! And anyone else taking your picture could impact your life. This is horrifying. At the least people must be able to see what photos they have and have the right to delete them. Also any photos from before age 25 or more then 10 years old should be automatically deleted.
Where the heck is Congress? Oh, wait, they are kinda busy right now. I am terrified for future generations.
3
How does this work when it pits itself against deep fake?
5
What a stunning and chilling piece of investigative journalism! Great job NYT. I'm writing my senators this weekend.
This is the kind of technology that every ethicist, concerned scholar, privacy advocate, and yes, creatives from Orwell to Atwood have warned us about. Scraping photos off the internet from social media platforms, etc., to make millions selling warrantless surveillance information is equivalent to committing a crime of theft. It doesn't surprise me they sought a "W" appointee, Clement, to help assuage legal questions: the administration that instituted torture, warrantless spying on American citizens, and endless war. It also doesn't surprise me that Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter and staunch libertarian who wants to "live forever" (New Yorker March 27, 2017 article) is funding this monstrosity. I agree with Hartzog, facial recognition should be banned in the U.S. If we don't pass strict laws against this, we can kiss democracy goodbye right along with individual freedom. This is no better than what China is doing: an authoritarian police state.
Stephen Hawking warned AI would be our downfall. Boy would I like to know what he would say about this. Imagine if Hitler or Stalin or even ole J Edgar Hoover had had this technology. Creepy doesn't even begin to describe this, it's just plain wrong and it's very, very dangerous!
19
Coupled with Google glasses and ubiquitous video cameras, this technology has the potential to make every middle income autocracy more totalitarian than Stalinist Russia. Meanwhile, it might shred the social fabric in much the same way as social media, but this time in a much more concrete and visceral way. Just think of all the ways people will turn within when their insides are placed on such full display, The fact that it is being promoted by an aid to one of Trump’s most corrupt henchman, and that the most likely clients are authoritarian states, suggests far deeper dangers than those imagined in this article. The question as always is whether we will rise to the occasion and resist it - and what will happen in those nations that don’t.
7
This is an excellent example why no wise person should ever post their photo on-line, period. And, yet another among a whole catalog full of reasons why no wise person would ever use Facebook.
4
The Times could get a security provider to run a photo of a prominent Congressman through Clearview and then show the results to him in his office. That should get things moving.
7
In the entertainment industry you have to get a signed release before you profit off someone's image. This violates existing law, I would think "Appropriation of Likeness" is illegal in most states.
8
This technology is a game changer. Assuming they can weed out ALL false positives (a difficult proposition) identifying criminals becomes a breeze. And thus eliminating the false eye witness identifications that have destroyed so many lives and put so many innocent men in jail for decades. The pros can certainly outweigh the negatives in serious episodes, but of course the whiners and complainers will ramp up the loss of freedom and privacy. And perhaps there will be some good unintended consequences as well. If you don't want to be 'spied on' - all you millenniums and gen Zers- stop putting your photos online. It is absurd and unnecessary.
One of the reasons why I never have put my image on line and never will.
6
You may not put it there, but I’ll bet it’s out there, anyway.
2
@Steve Dumford
You missed the part about security cameras and camera phones taking your picture almost constantly every time you venture outside your home.
1
All those professional facial experts that Britain uses to track people on CCTV footage may no longer have jobs. Unless that expert has always been an AI.
I am not bothered by this technology AT ALL. If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hid from. I hope for widespread adoption of this technology by my local, AMAZING, law enforcement to empower them to catch criminals.
@JJ " law enforcement to catch criminals."
If you think that's all this will be used for, you are very naive.
How about your Fourth Amendment rights? Are you willing to just give them up? If so, how about those other pesky "rights"?
4
I do not do social media and have NO pictures of myself online. When my company wanted my pic for their website, I was the only employee who declined - I am the rainmaker, so it's not like they can order me to do so. Instead I have a photo of some sunflowers. I saw this invasion of privacy coming from a long time back but the government can also get facial recognition off drivers licenses which is the one picture I cannot avoid. Maybe for my next DL, I will stuff my mouth with cotton balls and black out my front teeth.
4
@Eli
As a rainmaker, I guess you also used your power to send an email telling all other employees they were free to post sunflowers, too, with no repercussions whatsoever to their advancement at your company.
Right?
2
@Someone
They wanted their pictures there and used pictures from their Facebook pages. They are salaried workers while I get 50% of all revenues I bring into the company, so they are not my responsibility or my problem. Perhaps the reason they will never advance is that all their correspondence contains a silly picture - not one that inspires confidence - and emojis.
1
This is truly opening a Pandora's box . . the world will never be the same. Goodbye, anonymity, hello police state.
3
@nyt, thank you for reporting on this.
3
The so-called social media are turning into the back door of our lives. So the only clear vision I have is this: I have to delete my facebook profile.
6
@Alfredo Alfredo
I suggest you broaden that vision a bit. What about security cameras, public and privately owned? What about that couple taking a selfie video that pans past you in the background? What about that work convention last summer where 6 or 7 marketing departments took candids of the attendees and uploaded them to Twitter, Instagram and the host organization's website?
I think I am now even more thankful that my children do not allow their children's images on social media. I think I will work to reduce my image from being shared. Even though now is probably too late.
1
For those advocating the use of this technology by law enforcement, feel free to submit your photos. I for one value my right to privacy, and can easily imagine the spread of this technology into other "useful" realms ripe for nefarious abuse by those in power with special "interests".
This debate goes far beyond law enforcement... It digs deep into the delicate spheres of liberty, freedom, and basic constitutional rights.
5
This is why I never, ever posted a picture of myself online ... until my employer started requiring me to do so for the firm website.
And who knows what my friends, family and acquaintances have posted and tagged? Someone at my old sleepaway camp set up a website about 10 years ago and posted tons of nostalgia pix & videos that included some of me at age 8-12, tagged with my name. Those pix were taken around the time Al Gore was inventing the internet. I played Don Quixote and asked them to remove the tags.
I've never posted pictures of my kids, either, and told them to do the same. But the situation is even more hopeless for them.
4
There’s some fascinating work being done to create fashions and even hairstyles that thwart facial recognition technologies.
Time for all of us to revamp our wardrobes.
2
@Jim Heid , let's not kid ourselves. Criminals will be the first people to fund and adopt this type of thwarting technology; and then it's on like Donkey Kong with the subcutaneous microchips.
The Chinese government is already using AI facial recognition technology to track its citizens' comings and goings and document with whom they associate. There are entire apartment complexes that keep a tally on who has entered or exited and when. They have been using this as part of their systematic oppression of the Uighurs. Looks like law enforcement in the US is embracing this wholeheartedly. There is obviously no longer a right to anonymity or privacy in the eyes of governments or the police state. Big Brother is watching you. For real.
8
It's amazing how Mr. Ton-That has hidden his company's identity, as well as his own, from public view, all the while working to expose everyone else's. I find the idea of universal recognition unsettling to begin with, but I feel more unease with the hypocrisy by which it's being made. At minimum he should be holding himself to the standard his business demands of society.
9
Given it facial recognition or genetic editing of human or autonomous agents, I don't think anyone can stop the trend in which old norm of ethics and privacy is disrupted by fast evolving technology. We can debate the ethics all we want, but in the end the only choice is to accept whatever the growth of human knowledge and technology throws at us.
1
Let's not be fooled into believing this is only being used by Law Enforcement.
Given the commercial availability of facial recognition web services from the three hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft), and our insatiable appetitive to post pictures of ourselves for the world to see ... this is not a difficult solution to build. It took these guys 18 months to build it.
So my point is, there are many organizations that have access to this kind of information. It is not exclusively law enforcement.
Laws are required.
4
Apparently, this is not a case of someone inventing and some small group of people marketing a product which then is used for harmful purpose by some few users without the advance knowledge of the supplier of product.
Instead, this is a case of someone inventing a product and a group marketing that product specifically for use by many others whom the inventor and marketers know will use it for harmful purpose. I think that makes the inventor and those involved in marketing the product as themselves knowingly and intentionally acting to cause the harm. That is despicable behavior and the people doing it are as well.
7
Public presence with privacy?
The two are incompatible. Nobody is entitled to "privacy" in public. And certainly not when one posts a photo and identifiable personal info in a public computer forum.
Exactly what are all those protesting this "invasion of privacy" expecting? Anonymity? That expectation is unrealistic.
If authorities can identify those committing illegal acts using technology rather than immense manpower: That allows that manpower to instead focus on preventing crime. Now, if someone misuses that capability, there are legal processes that can be used to punish the offenders and institute tighter controls.
To reiterate: It is unrealistic, indeed illogical, to expect privacy when in public.
1
You are simply and incredibly wrong.
Why should a private citizen behaving legally have their movements tracked? Unless of course you believe in “guilty until proven innocent.”
The number of crimes committed in public is infinitesimal compared to the number of people who go about their lives legally, so such tracking is totally unjustified.
Your apparent concept of public space is also odd. We pay taxes. We are the public. We own the streets and sidewalks and parks. That is OUR property - not the government’s - and we have a right to use it as we wish so long as we don’t harm it or others … and to use it anonymously.
5
What's being described here is the following:
If you post your picture online somewhere, eg you've uploaded it to the web, anyone with access to that picture can run a piece of software that will find other pictures that look like, and may actually be, you.
Similarly:
If you post some writing somewhere to which you've signed your name, anyone with access to that post can run a different piece of software that will find other posts that appear to been written by, and may actually have been written by, you. It's an old piece of software in this case; it's called "Google".
Someone else can take your picture and run the first search.
Someone else can take something you've written and run the second search.
Maybe a bit specious, but not completely.
This is the way all technology advances. Once the underlying pieces are in place, it is relatively easy to assemble them into a breakthrough technology. Given that one person did this by himself, it is clearly not that difficult. There is no way to stop it. Seems much better to have our law enforcement on the cutting edge, rather than the criminals.
What privacy? It's been gone for a while now.
2
If it makes someone a lot of money, it’s automatically legal in America.
Nothing else matters.
Reaganomics has led us to this.
9
The two most consequential scientists of the twentieth century were J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the successful effort to develop the atomic bomb, and the mathematician John von Neuman, who was the main inventor of the computer. They symbolize the technology that is destroying our privacy, individuality, and human life itself.
The only thing that can save us is politics, which in its broadest sense is the art of living in society. We need new laws that will control nuclear energy and limit the police as well as corporations in their ability to monitor people's actions, conversations, and thoughts.
5
Faith in the certainty of iffy data will lead to lots of false positives and thence to legally unreliable identifications.
1
I fail to see the issue here. Facial recognition and large photographic databases have been around for thirty years or more. The difference with Clearview AI is that the company could get started with a few hundred thousand dollars, as opposed to the millions (or billions) that it once required. Its customers are ordinary civilian police departments, as opposed to secretly funded government agencies and large corporations.
Image processing and facial recognition are being democratized. This has its problems, but it’s ultimately a good thing.
4
@Global Charm " Its customers are ordinary civilian police departments, as opposed to secretly funded government agencies and large corporations. "
Au contraire! Perhaps you're unaware that the NSA does "bulk collection" of ALL our digital communications data, and stores it in their recently constructed mass storage facility in Utah. That means they have ongoing access to ALL law enforcement data, as well. The NSA is definitely a government agency, but their funding is murky ("classified" budget details never see the light of day).
This is NOT "democratization" in any sense of the word. It is EXACTLY what China does NOW with all their citizens, 24/7. Here, it is a violation of OUR Fourth Amendment rights. I will NOT surrender those rights!
2
As long as racism, bigotry, abuse of power, profiling with intention to harm exists, we should resist these technologies as it will be used to hurt people much more than to help.
8
Lots of comments today about Orwell, police states, and being cowed into submission by this new technology.
Why do you folks think that anyone in law enforcement is or ever would be interested in you?
I remember by 85 year old mother in law was apoplectic following the passage of the Patriot Act. "I don't want the FBI going to the local library to see what books I've checked out," she told me.
I told her that the only way the FBI would be interested in her is if she called a cave in Waziristan province a couple of times a week.
It took a while, but eventually she relaxed.
4
How can you say that when it is a proven fact that civil rights leaders have been surveilled? And the surveillance of a diplomat is top news right now??
6
@Person
How many years ago are you talking about? As for Marie Yovanovich -- that story will prove to be hogwash, as will much of what the convicted felon (who wants to make a deal with the Justice department) Mr. Parnas has to say.
1
sounds hellish. another reason to drop out of society and start herding sheep in New Zealand somewhere. these tech people need to slow their rolls.
4
@Alex Here's irony ofr you: Peter Thiel, one off the investors here, has purchased large properties in NZ, where he thinks he can hide from the future, many of the worst aspects of which HE funded.
2
First step is to close your FB account. Then we start passing some strict laws regulating who, what, where, when, how, and why this technology is used. C’mon people wake up and take some responsibility. Let’s push back on this. It’s not a foregone conclusion yet!
6
Consider that with this tool coupled with weapon-enabled drones will lead to a level of real-world mayhem, currently virtually enjoyed by gamers world wide, that will be enjoyed by billions watching the soon-to-be-announced Netflix series, "America's Top Assassins: Junior Level One (7-12 years old)"
7
Check out the documentary "A Good American." We have been living in a surveillance society since before 9/11. For some reason the NSA loaded up on generals & bureaucrats a few months before 9/11. When 9/11 hit, one of the NSA contractors said, into the camera, "We can milk this cow for 15 years." And Congress opened the coffers of the American people's taxes & poured our money out to anyone of the 18 policing agencies that we know of, no questions or transparency asked
The NSA had fired the small group of scientists who had created a world-wide surveillance system but with maintaining people's privace as a main priority.
The new, police state NSA spent multi billions on underground facilities & benign looking new buildings.
They created the Fusion Program. The headquarters is in Maryland, but the foot soldiers are local police. They are charged with gathering as much information of each of us as possible & then communicating that info to the central command center in Maryland, to be shared with every police agency, covert, local, federal.
They gather pictures from our DMV drivers license pictures,.
So there's no privacy & the terrorism-industrial-complex is in full operation. Again, watch "A Good American" and "The Great Hack."
3
@Caryl Towner Read Snowden's book.
@Slann
Of course! Thank you for the suggestion.
Is it just me or does there seem to be an absence of concern over police spying & FBI surveillanc, e.g., COINTELPRO type disruption of activists. I keep seeing another black activist killed, with no outcry. Where is the outcry over violation of civil liberties?
I foresee a booming fashion mask industry arising in the near future.
10
@Jack Venice! Yes!
1
This does not bode well for society.
If Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, one of the most famous private persons who ever lived, were alive today, she would perhaps double down on her darkest of sunglasses, hat and scarves.
5
Imagine what they must have on trump if they decided to look!
All those secret surveillance cameras!
And, it could be put up for a public delicacy, anytime, anywhere!
Imagine what a rich man would pay for protection against that!
8
ICE and Border Patrol have been recording retina scans of people seeking entry to the US for a while now. What do you think will happen to this data?
2
I think it is probably for the best that we, a pretty thick species, are soon to destroy the planet. We can’t seem to handle the responsibility of civil society. AI will doom us if the planet doesn’t die first.
2
The one good thing about this and social media is when certain politicians are denying they know this one or that, we can pull up a photo of the two of them together!
4
Criminals will love this technology. Just as they have weapons to match anything law enforcement has, they will also be able to identify law enforcement personnel by name, their snitches, even family members.
Yes, even Republicans and Christian nationalists will love this app. They will be able to identify and discriminate against Democrats and never-trumpers, women who have obtained abortions with a pill, and cake makers will be able to deny Peter Thiel a cake on religious grounds - all in real-time.
No doubt trumplican totalitarianism will give the chosen ones (the rich, trump loyalists, the Epstein-like, etc.) with protections, as innocent look-alikes get nailed for crimes they did not commit - for a fee, of course. Indeed, AI can search look-alike candidates and analyze their backgrounds to ensure they find the best scapegoats and plausible candidates to a crime actually committed by a wealthy client.
We need to replace the Guy Fawkes anonymous mask with a Ton-That or Schwartz mask. The things a trumpian-Republican regime could do with this technology is frightening. Add in Giuliani and we truly have a mess of criminality the likes we have never seen with this technology alone.
5
I think this is sweet, now everyone can know that my picture here is of me and my grandson at the Los Angeles Zoo staring in amazement at the length of a giraffe’s long purple tongue.
Anybody out there think this is actually new? Because I’ve got $100 that says the NSA has had this tech for a decade and more. By the time Florida PD can buy a technology for $10k, it’s old news.
3
Do you trust the Trump administration to use a tool like this in a well controlled, non-abusive manner? Witness how this technology is currently being used in China. You can run but you can't hide. Also, note the apparent political leanings of the people thus far involved with the development and promotion of Clearview AI. If it doesn't scare you, you aren't paying attention or you lack imagination.
6
“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Author disputed.
A series of virulent photos can globally travel the web and even outer space, before a person can log on in the morning.
Slime and backstabbing are serious concerns in the corporate world. Possibly more of a problem than in the world of law enforcement, where checks and balances do exist.
3
I'm not worried. As a gay man, I have posted quite a few pics in my day. But they are all, how shall I put it, "enhanced", "borrowed", "doctored"? I wish I looked like my pics:)
As for information posted online? Its an opportunity for creative writing. Am I a young, female, entrepreneur with a Master's Degree? No, but I play one online.
Any time I am asked to partake in a survey, I gladly do. And then I provide nothing but false information to skewer the database. Care to join me?
2
Exactly what is a “person of color” ? How do you decide who is included in the group?
1
The face mask/veil industry just got an enormous shot in the arm. Can a Ralph Lauren or Versace veil line be far away?
2
Is there any limit to the mischief which this program can be put to by the posting of photos on sock puppet accounts, imperfect matches, etc, etc?
2
Lawsuits galore. I am not a lawyer, I am a tech guy, this is expected but stunning in scope. Most on FB are unaware they can use privacy settings to not link to search engines or that they can change the settings... but that is barn-door thinking. Now that this tool has been "outed" by @nyt I'm certain that every government will be signing up and/or cloning it for their own purposes. The idea of finding sexual predators and murders is always the sales pitch, the real point is made in Minority Report, walking into a store and being greeted by the voice of Alexa. “Hello Joel, we have some lovely jeans on sale today. and by the way you look like that guy in Central Park the other day, I’ve called the police.”
4
@Joel Law It's true. A lot of lawyers are going to make a lot of money sorting this out for their clients.
What could possibly be wrong with this product when it's linked to people like Rudy Giuliani and Tomi Lahren, and companies like WeWork?
5
Given his history, anything Peter Thiel is involved with is immediately suspect in my book.
7
Samaritan has arrived. Just what we need.
1
Though I am on FB I have never posted a photo of myself. Been "tagged" by some friends in group shots but not specifically ID'd
I am very careful never to post pictures of myself. I urge people to do same
1
So Facebook has a "policy" against scraping images off their site but Peter Thiel is a Clearview investor and also sits on Facebook's board. What a joke.
14
Like we all knew this wasn't going to happen.
2
@Jim Brokaw
It’s called the fourth amendment.
1
We now proudly carry around on our person a tracker, microphone and camera. George Orwell could not have come up with such a perfect tool.
8
for those who've not been paying attention—dystopia is not in the future, it is here today, right NOW.
3
Wholesale copyright infringement, violation of terms and probably violates CCPA and BIPA. This company has “class action attorney bait” written all over it.
6
It's not technology's "fault" per se, this happens when we have a culture that attracts order obsessed, paranoid individuals to run the police and military, society in general. Tech is just a mean to an end.
Overall, what enabled this is a large scale society build on mindless growth in which the individual is reduced to a math problem; backed by data, people are blind to see their prejudice when observing data. If data shows X% of males with mustaches with certain skin tone are felons, the monkey brains of our law enforcement is probably going to start treating mustached people with certain skin tone poorly and feel righteous about it. This already happened to Muslim/Indians in post 911 world.
Is this a tech problem? No, it's a law enforcement problem, it's a culture problem.
2
Tech and Pharma have this devastating path in common: as soon as they develop anything remotely new, the instant they see a possibility; they simply implement, produce, and market that app, that algorithm, that pill. No thoughts to effects, repercussions, ramifications down the line.
No ethical, spiritual, philosophical, environmental considerations.
In fact, just about all manufacturing blithely turns off its thought processes beyond production, mass distribution, and sales. Meanwhile, under the present regime, regulations are systematically eradicated.
Boy do we need massive regulation if we want to leave a planet to seven generations. It's past time for Cradle To The Grave legislation—no one gets to manufacture or produce any product without a long process involving voices of support and opposition: ethicists, chemists and biologists, (no bankers), tasked with analyzing whether that product will biodegrade, sunset without toxic aftereffects, leave no radiating, vile, social-damaging half-life in its wake. These people suffer from their own zeal and tunnel-vision.
Profit before people can never have any other outcome than death. #sevengenerations
4
@Naples Capitalism has only ONE rule: ROI. Nothing else.
@Slann
ROI is the king who destroys the kingdom.
What is the average time one owns a stock now?
Answers on line range from 11 seconds to four months. Can't be good.
I want a law that allows me to copyright my face.
6
Ironic that the company hides itself so well eh. Transparency should go both ways but Peter wants to be in control.
3
Guess what guys, no laws for rich people! Tech IS the government now. And they are rubbing our faces in it.
1
It's the Jurassic Park effect.
"I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it".
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
Mr. Ton-That should face the same fate as Hè Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who genetically edited babies. Professionally discredited and sent to prison. There are lines technology shouldn't cross. Ton-That just crossed a big red line.
It doesn't matter whether the technology can be used for good. You could build law enforcement a better database for gun tracking. That would be good. It's the technology's potential for evil that's the problem. Hè got in trouble not for what he did but for what his experiments might do.
Ton-That belongs in prison. Instead, he's making money seasonally technology to law enforcement. This is why America is no longer the leader of the free world.
1
Anything Peter Thiel is involved in, you better believe its going to be malicious on some level.
8
How exactly did a college drop-out blithely move from Australia to San Francisco? With what visa?
5
Big brother is watching everyone, all the time. Devices, cameras, doorbells, Alexa. Privacy is gone for good. The government can invade anytime they want just ask Bill Barr.
2
The nytimes could leave this thread up for the entire year, and readers would still be generating fresh doomsday scenarios -- many of them plausible. By contrast, during Facebook's rise, few sounded the alarm, or at least the most negative consequences imagined at the time didn't seem much worse than the already egotistical friend becoming yet more insufferable or a batty aunt stuffing one's inbox with goofy cat videos.
At least we have one advantage here: at the outset, the frightening consequences are clearly discernible versus the crawling, insidious effects of social media. Can we somehow get in front of this and, if not exactly put the genie in the bottle, at least not allow it to grow to epic Jafar-ian proportions à la the last scene in Aladdin?
My hope is that with such a specter looming, and a general growing wariness with tech, citizens and governments are going to act aggressively (both in their best interests) to prevent technologies such as these from flourishing. What that might very well mean is a final reckoning between government and a mostly unfettered tech industry--a genie that has been long out of the bottle.
2
Sorry, too busy with the dystopian present.
2
There’s a saying in computer science: garbage in garbage out. All those afraid of big brother , take heart. Simply overwhelm the system with millions of deepfakes and the results become meaningless.
1
Havent read this bit but your headline is ridiculous. We lost the battle for privacy back in the 90s and now have an aged government that wants to regulate technology like we still have AOL cds.
1
Let's nip this in the bud, don'tcha think? If it requires a constitutional amendment, pass and ratify the darned amendment.
This will be the end of liberty.
2
Seems to me like the 4th Amendment should already cover this!
1
Privacy pretty much already ended
1
I suspect this horse left the barn years ago: drivers license pics, airbnb, military ids, etc. have long been available.
See also Pandora’s Box...
2
Is that a WeWork cup in the photo? Bodes well for this startup and its ambitious founder.
1
When seeing is no longer believing
Inside the Pentagon’s race against deepfake videos
Advances in artificial intelligence could soon make creating convincing fake audio and video – known as “deepfakes” – relatively easy. Making a person appear to say or do something they did not has the potential to take the war of disinformation to a whole new level. Scroll down for more on deepfakes and what the US government is doing to combat them.
1
“Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother.”
Facial recognition is the equivalent of “facecrime” in the Orwellian world of “1984”.
“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. To wear an improper expression on your face was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime."
5
A person’s voice also has a signature that can be analyzed. So all of you folks with a voice-controlled device in your home are filling huge databases with that raw information as well, and it will eventually be used to erode your privacy. (Some readers may not be aware that all the voice analysis — the *recognition* of words, phrases, and who is speaking — is done on servers at the other end of an Internet connection, it is not done privately by the device itself.)
The real “threat” is large-scale neural-network-based Artificial Intelligence that allows almost any form of information to be so rigorously analyzed that personal identification can be extracted.
Can you recognize a person from behind because you know their gait — how they walk? Yes you can. And so can AI (or it soon will).
1
America -as- Chinese security state.
Right, "I have nothing to hide."
2
Scuse me and all, but wasn’t Peter Thiel’s support for Hogan’s lawsuit spozed to be all about protecting privacy? Or is that just something he said because hey, why not?
4
So when will my door be broken down and my dog shot? Ooops, wrong guy. This has me worried and I believe it will happen with increased frequency.
3
This was the intent of smart/“camera” phones all along. There is metadata in every pic you take; save it to the cloud or publish to a third-party app and bam! Instantly downloaded to government databases.
1
Clearview depends on stolen images, many of them from Facebook. Shall we ask why Ton-That gets to shrug that off? Why hasn't FB sued him for a few billion and sought criminal charges?
6
@gc He's probably hoping they'll BUY HIM.
1
Not surprisingly, the terms of use for this company include prohibiting the very thing they have done to others: "The use of automated systems or software to extract the whole or any part of the Service or Website, the Information or data on or within the Service or the Website, including image search results or source code, for any purposes (including uses commonly known as 'scraping') is strictly prohibited." (see https://staticfiles.clearview.ai/terms_of_service.html)
7
A perfect example of the complete lack of ethics among software creeps.
5
Looks like I'm going to have to dig up that Groucho Marx glasses/eye brows/nose set up and big floppy hat to help disguise my mug.
So very glad I never went that you tube/facebook/twitter/ instagram route because once that stuff is out there, it's out there forever and ever and ever.
3
Hate to break it to you but if your friends or family use FB and post pics that they tag, you’re already “out there”, even while attempting to avoid FB.
@Greenie
Fortunately they don't because they know how I feel about social media cites. But thanks for the heads up.
1
And who was this first pitched to? Anti-Semites and Peter Theil. THAT should raise more than a few red flags.
The threat against our "free" society has never been greater. Our dystopian future is upon us ... If we don't turn back the tide of Republican authorianism this fall we are doomed.
5
This company should be banned and fined for collecting online photos without consent.
4
Time to invest in face mask stock.
2
First Wanted posters.
Then Finger prints.
Then DNA sampling.
Now Facial recognition.
Seems like more good than bad has come about over the years.
Hopefully society will continue to gain benefit. In the meantime, nasty people beware.
1
There are laws on the books that can be used to take Facebook down. Why aren’t they being held accountable for violating people’s privacy especially if/when it violates their own policies, and how about defamation suits for all the lies they knowingly publish? What are attorneys afraid of? Wake up - this is your new cottage industry!
3
Uh... guys... privacy is already dead. Look around you. We are already living in a dystopian future where the wealthiest billionaires literally have access to flying cars, and the rest of us have to take insulin meant for cats and dogs because human insulin is made artificially expensive by drug companies.
Wealthy people buy private firefighting services to save their unsustainably gigantic and resource consuming mansions, while water tables that feed low income communities go dry. Militias on the southern border unlawfully detain anyone who doesn’t look like Marcus Allback while there are gigantic white supremacy rallies in dozens of major metropolises that are essentially sponsored by the President.
If you don’t think we are living in a dystopian future, then it means you don’t know what a dystopian future even is.
4
Wow, imagine the free press informing a free people about an issue that could seriously affect our lives, our privacy rights, our freedom.
Kind of like our founders hoped it would.
I would think only an anti-American, ignorant of the most important pillar of our freedom - our right to be informed - would call that free press "the enemy of the people."
Yeah, only an ignorant anti-American.
1
AI, Facial recognition, the Google people paying the homelss $5.00 in SF to take their pictures. As a minority the justice system is always following you for crossing the streets. doesn't matter who you are, your skin is black.
Their is a reason for profit prisons, to lock you up based on the error of a computer program. We have dysfunctional white police officers who shot to kill they get fired from one department and move on to the next one. , this will give them an opportunity to use facial recognition to kill minorities and get away with it
.
We are aware of American history and it is not pretty picture. These the companies will stand by their errors because that is the American way. Minorities lives do not matter, we live to be killed by the white man just like Native Americans.
Watching the corruption in DC and Facebook bragging that they are going to keep up misleading political ads, we the people are all alone in the new Wild Wild West of white America.
Besides the economic issues facing Americans this is another reason why people don't want to have children. Who wants to have there children watch them being shot to death based on an error in a technology program. We have thousands of people sitting in prisons of color for crime that they did not commit.
1
"Asked about the implications of bringing such a power into the world, Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback.
“I have to think about that,” he said. “Our belief is that this is the best use of the technology.”
Clearly, he has not thought about it before letting this particular jinni out of the bottle. Just how long does he think it will be before this becomes a stalker's BFF? If that happens to be a cop, then it's already afoot.
2
You see! China is not really far away.
5
Hmmm...My forecast for the future now includes unisex burqas becoming all the rage.
2
It is a matter of security. The age old cry of the oppressor. - Jean Luc Picard
2
That's it. I'm wearing a Groucho Marx disguise everywhere I go from now on.
2
I guess were entering a new world of face concealing fashion.
3
See Infinite Jest.
What the consumer should fear is the proliferation of wireless devices inside the home.. because these can be easily hacked by a capable hacker.
Being camera scanned on a public street however... learn to live with it. The best this tech can do.....as long as you have not actual photos of you anywhere on the internet on any account that has your personal information... is perhaps track your movements from place to place.
The thing is... only law enforcement has easy access to surveillance cameras and the tech to use the images to concatenate your movements ... and I don't see an issue with that as long as you are not doing anything wrong.
Stay off of social media, or at least do not create any accounts on social media and you largely inhibit this technologies value to poach information about you.
“ Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.”
That is: they are using untested, unproved data to “solve” cases. Authorities ought to know better. Such low-quality “evidence” should be immediately thrown out by courts. Prosecutors attempting to use it should be reprimanded.
2
We caused this. Let’s stop getting hysterical.
1
And we thought that poisoning by nukes and weapons of mass destruction or biology were going to destroy us...this will too. Brave New World, 1984, THX 1138, Soylent Green, The Matrix, and Logan's Run have nothing on what this will do to us by their users and their mega-storm troopers, our cops. Won't have to wait long. Humanity has already killed itself.
2
Yay! AG Barr can now put names and addresses to everyone who participates in a demonstration against the Emperor. Remember, folks, what is not permitted is forbidden.
2
This article was actually the thing that got me the close my Facebook account.
3
Then why can’t my phone recognize my face?
“ Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.”
That is: they are using untested, unproved data to “solve” cases. Authorities ought to know better. Such low-quality “evidence” should be immediately thrown out by courts. Prosecutors attempting to use it should be reprimanded.
1
People put their photos out the in the public domain. So what are they complaining about???
Orwellian for sure. Glad I'm old enough to avoid most of future's monitoring and recording of our every move. Too police state. Too Chinese.
Too creepy!
2
This needs to be banned. Period.
3
“While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.”
So, Clearview is also its own customer, which allows it to monitor law enforcement activities at will. And they illegally and unethically scrape photos from websites, notably Facebook. Yet no one seems to be that bothered. Including investors — and determined stalkers. It seems that not only privacy is up for discussion, but what constitutes “crime” is also being redefined.
I guess the next anti-privacy abomination coming to America is the use of drones and GPS tracking devices to help people find individuals they’re looking for. Repo men, psychotic jilted lovers, loan collection agents, etc. Come to think of it, a personal Clearview account is probably all they’ll need.
How about a start-up that specializes in 3-D gun printing kits, including silencers? If investors and law enforcement can turn a blind eye to Clearview’s illegal activities, since there’s a buck to be made and a conviction rate to chase, surely they could forgive this.
Meanwhile, China has already embraced facial recognition dystopia, while the EU is ready to ban it. Time to choose your future, America.
7
This company is merely a side effect not the disease. Things would have never gotten this worse if it were not for giant centralized repos of information owned by a greedy private company with no morals -- Facebook.
It is also ironic that the famously private Mr. Thiel has absolutely no qualms about getting rich from pimping everyone else's privacy -- Palantir, Clearview AI and Facebook.
6
And so it begins? (Or is this the end?)
Welcome to Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon.
3
Interesting article. My only concern is how the Times insinuates that this technology is only being championed by Republicans or conservatives. Kind of brushed over the possible democrats and left involved in this.
I guess I will have to go to Fox and Breitbart to get the other side of this story.
The government thanks all you selfie takers for creating a robust database!
2
Why are private companies allowed to steal people's photos for a commercial profit making?
6
The premise that facial recognition only NOW has become a reality is simply wrong.
We can't get a head of the threats it poses to privacy and the rule of law legislatively.
"Paying With Your Face: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017"
'Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?'
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-paying-with-your-face/
"Why Don’t We Care About China’s Uighur Muslims?"
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/29/why-dont-we-care-about-chinas-uighur-muslims/
1
this is a disgusting breach of privacy. Mr. Ton-That is clearly an evil money-grabber who is quite literally throwing everyone else's privacy away for his own paycheck. This is a huge overstep and this technology should never be implemented. the fact that someone spent the time to develop this horrible thing is just wrong and scary.
2
Absolutely terrifying. Stalkers will be able to find anyone they want. Angry abusers will find the people they want dead. This has to be outlawed.
3
"Asked about the implications of bringing such a power into the world, Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback.
“I have to think about that,” he said. “Our belief is that this is the best use of the technology.”
Mr. Ton-That ... are you truly so entranced by technology that you don't recognize it's drastic dangers? Or was your statement merely facetious?
3
“In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.” This is beyond frightening.
4
Facebook and Google have become no more than cyber cesspools where users just get ripped off.
2
And we thought the movie “Minority Report,” with Tom Cruise was silly fanciful fiction. I am waiting for the pre-cogs.
That’s not nice, Ton-That!!!
Thanks for the warning, but this article should have led with a hirez photo of Mr. Ton-That himself and that of his partner Schwartz and employees that we can copy and use for whatever purposes we wish - he’s already doing that to all of our images without our permission, consent or payment.
At what point can citizens claim ownership of any and all likenesses of oneself like models and movie stars can? Including any data derived from recognition?
Who gave Mr. Ton-That the right to profit off my likeness and data derived from it? Do we all have to wear the famous “anonymous” Guy Fawkes masks in public and in family portraits?
“Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani” what could possibly go wrong???
That obviously lacks imagination and integrity. Hopefully modeling pictures of him circulate for all kinds of uses without permission or compensation to him, just as he is doing with copyrighted images he scrapes off the web.
I’m surprised Google, Amazon or other giant hasn't smooshed him like a “worum” - in Braveheart-speak.
Typical of the college dropouts - they think they know better than anyone else when all they do is cut corners and cheat their way to success at the expense of millions of other’s.
The next “app” will be makeup that we can apply to our face that fools facial recognition.
1
Save yourself and the planet: live simply, naturally, peacefully!
2
If we are going to talk about immigration reform maybe we should consider limits on Australians? Rupert Murdoch, Julian Assange, this guy...
2
In general, unless you have been arrested or are particularly prominent, your photo is online, attached to your name, because you've put it there.
As they have likely scrapped all users of Facebook globally, this seems to be in blatant violation of the GDPR.
If you’re in Europe I would suggest flagging to the relevant authorities. It may help the rest of us as well!
4
This technology is disturbing on its face (pun intended). I see it's positive elements, but in the wrong hands, and it will get into the wrong hands, is a wholy different can of worms.
Further alarming is that you have primarily republican operatives pushing it (no doubt it's use would ultimately become bipartisan).
We have a self confessed pro-white anti-Semite citing "extreme oppo", a former W. Bush Solicitor Gen., now partner at Kirkland Ellis (Wm. Barr's former employer), Peter Thiel who destroyed Gawker out of pique and with the sheer force of his millions, and the Fox Nation NRA loving Tomi Lahren. And don't forget Zuckerberg's Facebook and his refusal to prohibit blatantly false political ads who has the faces and personal data.
Imagine this tool in the hands of these people - frightening doesn't begin to cover it.
1
A company run by Republicans using information they got from Facebook. I am sure this won’t turn into another Cambridge Analytica.
2
Privacy? What a quaint notion. That ship has sailed, folks. Americans signaled we are willing to end all privacy back in the
1980s when we willingly allowed the government to tap our bladders. Not even Orwell or Kafka could have imagined mandatory urine testing without probable cause. Privacy? That reminds me of the splendid (even if apocryphal) quotation from Mohandas Gandhi when asked what he thought of Western civilization, he said: "| think it would be a good idea."
Where have you people been?
https://emcphd.wordpress.com
1
Nobody comments on hoan associates. The same one the support the unlawful Trump. These rich people that do anything to justify their misdeeds. People that do anything to stay in power. That lie. That cover lies. That takes away support for minorities. That find it normal to put kids in jail. That order a hit on an ambassador because she was resisting to provide help for corrupted president that tries to corrupt US democracy so he can continue to destroy the planet create wars ...
1
Ostriches know the future.
Prediction...lot's of poor and middle class people who can't afford topnotch attorney's are going to be railroaded into prison by incompetent and lazy law enforcement.
1
We are all Uighurs now.
3
What?!?!
Why are we allowing this?!?
Americans need to boycott fakebook, Twitter, Instagram until this STOPS.
Now you know why Antifa wear masks.
3
The potential for abuse is very high. Snap a photo, overlay declaratory statements like false claims of sexual abuse, pedophilia, firearms crime, and then upload to a public social media site being scanned by Clearview AI. Once it's been scanned into Clearview's database, remove it.
1
How does one request their data and request it to be deleted from Clearview AI? All contact forms are broken on their site. Are they violating GDPR and CCPA?
4
Use of facial recognition software is unlawful under GDPR, but there are Article 9 exceptions for such matters as law enforcement, public health etc. The EU is now considering an absolute right of ownership over one’s facial images and a five year moratorium on the use of such software to allow ethical standards to catch up.
2
So we might catch more criminals? Horrors!
Maybe we'll all end up wearing those face coverings like conservative Muslim women.
If this app has been scraping from Facebook and the likes in violation of their rules, can the offended companies or individuals sue to have the contents of their servers scrubbed?
1
I'm waiting for the time that AI can detect intentional lying with 100% accuracy. Then, we can just point cameras at Trump and all our politicians and witnesses and everyone and see who's telling the truth and who is the con artist.
1
This guy is going to get a Medal of Honor from Trump. What a gift to any wannabe Dictator, Autocrat, Authoritarian!
2
“We’re already dead”: 1984
2
Still pledging allegiance to this place?
1
Good, when I want to commit a crime I'll be sure to wear a mask that's set up to look like someone else's face. Ta-dah, a perfect patsy (and no need for an alibi).
This guy is literally a Bond villain.
2
This just like the theme of the TV show "Person of Interest" with Jim Caviezel
1
Stalkers and assorted other dangerous people are celebrating.
Funny how San Francisco is always at the forefront of protecting the "rights" of criminals. Dirty Harry was ahead of its time.
We have seen this movie before.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
"Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
"Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
"Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
2
So when you are walking down the street, your face is a secret? Do I have that right?
There is a beauty to this technology. A science fiction come true. An imagination real.
On the banal side, discovering that a photo is that of Barack Obama or Howard Stern is of dubious value.
Sooner or later someone will be able to discover that I am sitting on my sofa at home writing a comment on NYT. Won't that be interesting.
2
This is software made by fascists for fascists. This is software made for the specific purpose of rounding up people and placing on them an identity tied to criminal activity, which gives species permission to authorities to harass, imprison, and possibly murder them.
Peter Thiele is pure evil. Mr. Ton-That, imagining himself royalty, but unable to succeed in any typical training-for-adulthood, appears to be a personality-disordered monster.
Let's be clear, the people making and using such software ARE the Ton-That's 'community of bad people'.
Thanks, NYT, for once again normalizing fascist, totalitarian behavior.
4
Big Brother is Us.
"a dystopian future or something" !!?
If it wasn't so disturbing, I would revel in the stupidity of a statement like that. What might that "something" be?
1
The idea that murderers, rapists and violent offenders might one day be captured and face justice solely because of this kind of technology should not sit well with any citizen.
"In one, he is shirtless and lighting a cigarette while covered in what looks like blood." Uhhhhhhh we're not going to discuss this? Such a shady character.
1
Obliviously we walked into the end of privacy, happily handing over they keys to those ready to make a buck off our faces and data. Even in our school halls. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/opinion/lockport-facial-recognition-schools.html
If this is the future, I'd rather die now.
2
"Might" end privacy as we know. it? Have you read a newspaper lately? Pretty sure that horse left the barn at least 10 years ago.
1
Nothing new here folks. Fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, Putinists, Ayatollahs and the lot perfected even better surveillance measures: Your neighbors, your friends and your family. Repression and terror doesn’t need hi tech. It just needs agreement that your bill of rights and constitution privileges are unnecessary impediments to govern your state.
1
"A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers"
'The authorities can scan your phones, track your face and find out when you leave your home. One of the world’s biggest spying networks is aimed at regular people, and nobody can stop it.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/technology/china-surveillance.html
Great idea because there is no such thing a crooked cops, right?
2
Weird, though, that nobody can find two of the six white supremacist terrorists who beat DeAndre Harris half to death in Charlottesville three years ago. We have all of these great photos of them, video even, from every angle - yet they’ve disappeared like ghosts.
Well, I’m sure a tool owned by Peter Thiel and run by American cops would never be selectively applied. It’s probably just the one and only time those two guys ever appeared in a photo, right?
Anyway, have fun at the women’s march, everyone! Be sure to wave hello to the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, Russian intelligence, all the tech startup bros, and our billionaire overlords. There’s nothing to fear, and everyone’s vote will be counted in November.
3
Is there a way to see if your profiles have been scraped?
3
"or something" ?
2
Real life is looking like fiction. This is like HBO's fictional company, Pied Piper, on "Silicon Valley."
Pied Piper's software was able to worm through networks and defeat encryption eliminating all privacy.
There is no way this tool, or one like it, won’t be made available to law enforcement.
False positives? We’ve always had that problem: It’s called eye-witness testimony.
I’m glad law enforcement has tools like this to identify criminals.
1
Early days. The accuracy of such software will improve significantly over time. What are the possible benefits that we might trade off for such loss of privacy? Our cellphones, cameras, Alexa-like devices, cars, and televisions are becoming two-way identification and information devices. If it can be done, then humans will eventually do it. Dystopian vs Utopian and the vast spectrum of possibilities.
1
It was just a matter of time, really. The old adage question, "Just because we can, should we?" has been answered in our tech age: "Of course we should! We can become billionaires by writing code!"
Give up your ideas of privacy, people. There is some whip-smart youngster out there learning to code now...
3
This is reminiscent of the show within the past 5-8 years - Person Of Interest. I recall watching the show several times thinking it won't be long before someone figures out how to do this exact thing.
Apparently we're getting closer & it's very unsettling.
We need to shut this stuff down. Law enforcement will use any tool to invade our privacy. Where are the legislators in this? Doing nothing?
3
@JP The House Oversight and Reform Committee is discussing facial recognition technology policy right now—tune into CSPAN.
I suppose we should be writing to our legislators to demand swift action.
5
Even in cases where these data are not stolen (because people made them available by intent in a certain context, like for a social network profile), the data resulting from automated indexing or merging of different data sources (something that in many countries is strictly regulated and/or prohibited across different branches of the state apparatus' bureaucracy, afaik) should be considered very illegal, especially where they are offered as commercial services to anybody/everybody, and since these technically enhanced personal data sets appear "out of nowhere" and out of the context in which they had originally been published. People's right on their own personally identifiable data should clearly include the right for these data not to be out out of context by arbitrary strangers.
The European General Data Protection Regulation, often criticized for reaching "too far", seems pretty clear-sighted - and weak - in light of such developments.
5
GDPR already prevents use of these images without consent. The EU is considering a five year ban and an absolute right over one’s own facial images.
2
If we are ever going to have internet voting that's secure, a good facial recognition program would be one way to verify the users.
2
It's funny how nobody seems to care that "private companies" scrape and index personal data from random URLs (often against the terms of the services behind these URLs, and likely violating the law valid in the countries of origin of the persons affected).
Even more bizarre that indeed it must seem safe for these companies to assume that no one would challenge their "right" to keep these data even after these original sources would be taken offline. Apparently it's safe for them to assume they can legally pursue their business model in the future, and will not be charged criminally.
Clearly there are a lot of people who "believe it's ok" to create databases of other people's data, and it's almost comical how shameless they are about it. Private companies who have stolen people's data against these people's wills go to law enforcement and offer the stolen goods.
3
@Not Sayin I do care and I don't believe it's okay. I also don't believe it's right for doctors to use patients' dna for research, then sell the results to private companies at a. great profit while leaving the owner out. It's just that nobody is raising the issue very publicly which I also find astonishing.
1
I have nothing in particular against tech but have yet to see much good in the people who own, control and wield it.
1
As a data scientist with expertise in social media research, it is very important to highlight that nearly all machine learning algorithms are more accurate when applied to white male subjects. This is not because machine learning is inherently biased, it is because most of the readily available data is biased. Facial recognition technology that is not approved by an independent party of expert AI researchers should not be integrated into any government system.
8
As if I needed any more encouragement to minimize my presence on Facebook and its associated websites.
6
This is by far the most frightening article I have read since the one about our planet having already passed the tipping point.
12
It seems to me that the benefits of this technology outweigh the risks by orders of magnitude. Obey the law, pay your taxes, and you should be good.
3
@David H
another proof of what's is names adage never underestimate........
1
@David H If it isn't already, that last sentence ought to be a meme for naivete.
1
Unless they stand at your doorstep and want to arrest you because of a lack in recognition...
1
I always assumed tech companies did facial recognition for the federal government like at airports for a steep price. As usual this being bankrolled by the usual suspect.
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/
This might be more about getting a third party to scrap and create a data set without approval or paying tech giants which limits liability. It is not practical to sue a company only worth 7 million dollars. The data set will likely be stolen by hackers and then made publicly available along with the software to train an AI with it.
Stalkers will use it. Criminals will know if the person they are in business with is an undercover agent or a reporter. Totalitarian dictatorships will use it as another tool for oppression.
It may be impossible to stop. What is available to defeat this technology? People at protests may wear masks which makes peaceful protests more likely to turn violent. But is there a tech solution like encryption? Will websites have to randomize names and pictures, alter facial features, and add a lot of fake data to protect their users?
5
To protect our anonymity in the coming years we may find ourselves wearing Venetian Carnival masks whenever we leave the house. An autonomous car ride to the grocery store or a subway ride to work, hiding our faces under expressionless masks. If those are banned, then perhaps people will resort to 3D printing soft makeup prosthetics to change facial proportions every couple of days.
How about fashionable light weight full coverage helmets?
5
@gc
They did an episode of Elementary where this was a thing and the guy trying to hide had dyed his hair several colors and had face makeup in bright colors and odd patterns.
I cannot say that the republicans de-regulation which has made this sort of thing, the introduction of products to market before proving them safe, possible was intended to allow this. I can say their efforts at deregulation and recalibration of social morals has created the last couple of generations of people who have no compunctions about infringing on the rights of others.In fact most of them are not even aware of the rights they infringe.
The only solution is a total ban but of course all the biggies will lie about having stopped.
1
Facial recognition is not all that it is all cracked up to be.
My granddaughter, through facial recognition, can get into my daughter's I-phone and bank account. A good kid, she told her mother that she could get in.
Sure, they look similar, but are not the same person. Both are blonde, with Anglo-Saxon facial structure. Neither is likely to commit a heinousness crime, but if the facial recognition cannot sort out these two individuals, whatever will law enforcement do with "facial recognition" of all those folk who "look alike" to police officers and are thus arrested?
5
Facial recognition is not all that it is all cracked up to be.
My granddaughter, through facial recognition, can get into my daughter's I-phone and bank account. A good kid, she told her mother that she could get in.
Sure, they look similar, but are not the same person. Both are blonde, with Anglo-Saxon facial structure. Neither is likely to commit a heinousness crime, but if the facial recognition cannot sort out these two individuals, whatever will law enforcement do with "facial recognition" of all those folk who "look alike" to police officers and are thus arrested?
1
This raises many questions about how the functioning of AI compares to a human doing the same job. Theoretically, if the police department could afford to hire an unlimited number of people to comb the internet and look for the faces of crime suspects, would the results be the same, better, or poorer? Would the results differ among certain groups by race or gender? Would the same be true of people seeking to identify someone of a different race? It would seem unlikely that the police are relying on the results provided without reviewing them. If this software is adding another layer of information to an already open investigation, when there is a failure it would have to be both machine and human. Would combined police and AI processes lead to better results or compound mistakes?
There is already a long history of human error in identification, some of which can be chalked up to stereotyping and the round up of known previous offenders. Knowing that interactions with law enforcement tend to beget more attention from law enforcement, does this technology frighten us so much because it finally puts us all on equal footing as potential suspects?
1
This tech has potential value for historians professional or amature. As old photos are included in data bases, searching them for historical matches could be an invaluable research tool, even for the individual. Imagine being able to scan one of your ancestors photos sitting in the bottom of a box, unlabeled, and find the person in some data base.
So, don't pitch all those old unlabeled pictures your folks left you. You may find some interesting people and information.
Once again we're reminded that the people creating our online future are utterly amoral and unwilling to consider the consequences of their actions.
8
You don't have to be the one creating anything online, you could just be collateral in someone else's creations. Privacy laws need to be changed and written by the citizens, not corporate lawyers
1
"Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
All that's missing is the shrug.
Clearly Mr. Scalzo has trouble imagining a dystopian future, perhaps because he is so rich that he'll be insulated from it. Or else he doesn't understand what "dystopian future" means.
I value my privacy so I never signed up to any social media sites. As far as I know there are no photos of me anywhere on the internet. So maybe I'm safe for now - until my personal photos stored on iCloud are hacked.
10
@DM Unfortunately, cameras are being set up in malls and other public places to collect pictures. They can connect a picture they take of you at an intersection with your cell phone geolocation data and know exactly who you are.
3
This and similar reports have occasioned demands to restrict facial recognition technology. However, those horses (there are many facial “recognition” technologies) are out of the proverbial barn.
What’s needed is to regulate *uses*, and mandate quality control, of such technologies. One immediate field for regulation, indirectly demonstrated by this Times article, is law enforcement. Evidently, unwarranted worship of facial “recognition has eroded standards of evidence.
Judges must throw out cases brought on the basis of a “recognition” system whose accuracy (including lack of false positives, i.e., not implicating innocent people) has been scientifically and authoritatively certified. Prosecutors who try to bring cases based on such questionable evidence (and judges who accept such evidence) should be reprimanded and censured. This could go a long way toward curbing indiscriminate applications of facial “recognition” technologies.
To get a handle on new technologies, insist on quality control of their applications. Intelligently applied (there’s the rub!), that ought to help dry up inadequate applications and help curb dangerous technologies.
2
One can only hope Mr. Ton-That ends up wrongfully imprisoned due to mismatch of his own likeness, and a typically inaccurate eye witness. Such sweet irony that would be. Perhaps that would make him realize the harm in what he's done.
7
The cybersecurity industry cherishes it's own own privacy (as stated here in the article), but they do not offer that same set of privacy rights to the public for which they greatly profits from. We are the product like it or not.
That said, the European GDPR regulation model is what is badly needed here in the USA, but as we all know, individual privacy rights comes secondary to corp profits and shareholder value here in the good old USA.
6
@:-( Yeah, and my immediate thought, towards the end of the article was the question about this technology necessarily undermining democratic principles or ideals.
Interesting article. I liked the creepy overtones implied by the part of the article titled "where everyone knows your name". At this point, though people just need to get used to it though. I mean, all the talk about those flying drones making people uncomfortable. A cell phone is really no different.
Welcome to the 21st century.
1
and if you are in the witness protection program?
26
And with world wide internet any country you travel to will be able to ID you and decide whether you enter or not. Steven Spielberg got it right in Minority Report with facial scanning everywhere and automatic ads and being in a perpetual police state.
6
The consequences of this for our privacy and social fabric will be severe. But trying to address these threats raises an interesting opportunity that might also address inequality and automation erasing jobs—A way to compensate people for the violation of their privacy would be laws entitling everyone to some of the profit from every company that makes money from their data.
If we own our identities, then we should also own a portion of Google, Facebook, and the countless other data mining and advertising companies.
6
They need to pass a law that 1) law enforcement cannot purchase faces from private companies and 2) stored faces of non-convicted criminals can only be stored for a finite amount of time.
Otherwise we're just like Hong Kong or worse, the submissive ones in mainland China who don't bother to protest anymore.
6
Time for Americans to openly question the virtues of capitalism. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme where we are all but forced to participate in order to survive, regardless of the consequences. Hoan's creation allows vulture capitalists to earn large amounts of money while owning a powerful technology which steals images from unwitting individuals (the 99%), all in the name of innovation.
Imagine a world where innovation is rewarded based on its value to society not purely monetary to an individual/company. A reasonable amount of money is earned with other benefits.
24
"But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that rates the performance of facial recognition algorithms."
This technology is evil. Software like this is ALWAYS going to end up being used for the wrong purposes. People have the right to keep their lives private and shouldn't have to fear that all their information is being handed to strangers simply because they walked outside.
What scares me the most about technology like this is how likely it is to be misidentified. It's unknown how often the software is wrong. But it should be obvious that false matches are bound to happen and that the wrong people are going to get in trouble because of it.
11
I'm much more concerned by the chance of being mis-identified by some crazy total stranger... a nightmare I lived for a decade until last year, when my doppleganger, Dr. Thomas Burchard, a local psychiatrist, was murdered. I was first alerted by a supermarket checker at the local Save-Mart two blocks away, where I shopped almost daily, who made seemingly random remarks like "forget something?" and "don't you work today?" and "when did you start eating that?"
After many such seemingly offhand quips, not to mention all the random hard stares wherever I went that had me checking a mirror, I learned that she thought I was a long-time shopper who was a doctor known as "Tom." Eventually, after almost weekly encounters with complete strangers who greeted me as "Tom," I learned his full name when a random woman in the lobby at the post office a block from my home cornered me and excitedly exclaimed: "Don't you recognize me, Doctor Bruchard? I'm your patient!"
After an online search, it occurred to me that I could have been at some risk ever since I moved here, to quiet, safe Carmel. And, not from any government... but from some random, angry stranger without so much as a camera.
5
Perhaps it’s time for citizens to put aside the petty partisan squabbles the elites (and their lackeys in the media, ahem) put forward in order to divide us and conquer and reach across the aisle to put down these corrupt systems and the villains they support before it's too late, if it isn’t already.
2
A functioning democracy would enact a federal privacy law with real teeth. A compromised democracy owned by lobbyists would do nothing. Which do we have? I’ll take my answer off the air...
8
Facebook sues them on basis of scraping. Discovery process nets millions of scraped FB images. Each is a copyright violation meriting treble damages. Bye bye Clearview AI.
4
No! Facebook won’t sue them. Facebook secretly backs them. In the article: Peter Thiel is main Investor of Clearview. And who is Peter Thiel? Main and founding investor of Facebook. And even board member of fb.
It doesn’t get more obvious...
1
'Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.'
Sigmund Freud
3
@Dann Mann
Anonymity is your last freedom.
2
Anyone who did not see this coming at the outset of the internet is naive. This is what it is all about: anonymity replaces privacy. You broke it you buy it
How interesting to have just recently stumbled across this quote from Carl Jung:
"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you."
9
In sanctuary cities criminals are released as quick as they are arrested ,a few for murder recently.The law is only as good as enforcing it ,which rarely happens.
1
@Alan Einstoss Please tell me which cities that release those arrested for murder without bail or electronic monitoring. We need to know the specifics.
5
I suppose the most non-shocking thing about this is the fact that Peter Thiel is backing this.
Nothing says “Conservative except for people I’m afraid of” like backing a surveillance app.
11
Imagine entering a store and being identified within seconds, income, credit score, criminal record, home ownership, ..., imagine attending a rally and being instantly identified, imagine going to an abortion clinic and being instantly identified by pro-life activists, imagine walking out early from work and being identified by your company's surveillance cameras, imagine being tracked 24/7. Imagine a pedophile with access to this technology, imagine a burglar with access to this technology identifying you on an outing with your family or on a family vacation. Imagine a blackmailer standing close to the exit of a seedy motel with this technology.
With time and imagination, the possibilities are endless. I am sure we will all be much safer thanks to this technology.
7
AS if I needed another reason to loathe law enforcement.
2
Nice.
Let’s monetize that.
We are broken.
5
Time to find an island off the grid
4
"might" lead to a dystopian future?
No "mights" about it.
5
it is known that this software does not work well with men of color (Hispanics, African-Americans, Japanese, Chinese), but also for females the software is not that precise. Basically, for everyone who is not a Caucasian male, it will cause a humongous number of mistaken identifications. That alone is very worrisome.
5
Privacy. What a quaint notion!
1
This was entirely predictable although the implications of this tech is not. With the proliferation of social media and the public's infatuation with taking photos of everyone and everything they encounter, it won't be long until the locations where photos are taken will also be easy to determine as well as who is in the photo. imagine having to explain to your partner, family, work, why you were where you were at .......when you might not want to
Justice William Brandeis, who wrote so, thoughtfully and intelligently about personal privacy is rolling in his grave.
3
"Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the app’s legality."
Paul Clement does not come cheap and his day job is appellate advocacy not privacy law.
Someone is lawyering up for federal court litigation that may go to the Supreme Court
6
Look at the cast of characters promoting this next time a Republican or a conservative tells you they support liberty.
2
A poster child reference example of why you should NEVER put any photos of you on the internet.. especially within large social media databases (which law enforcement believe to be freely accessed by them).
As for any public surveillance of you while walking down the street or driving.. get over it. It's public space and as such you are subject to public access of said information.
The reality is.. laws must be developed and passed that put clear and reasonable constraints on use of such data by both the public and law enforcement. It will take time for legislation to catch up with fast moving technology..... more so in some countries than others.
2
Tech wins! Embrace the new Lord.
Hello! We have already reached a dystopian future aka: Orwellian". That was 36 years and 18 days ago ("1984").
1
The end of the privacy!
Give people access to their own data in this app and let them decide how they want it used. If I don’t want to be in this app for whatever reason I can have all my images deleted. Why should they profit at my expense?
1
NYC police have been using this technology since 2011.
'How Facial Recognition Makes You Safer'
"Used properly, the software effectively identifies crime suspects without violating rights."
By James O’Neill
Mr. O’Neill is the New York police commissioner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/opinion/facial-recognition-police-new-york-city.html
'Technology has improved the profession beyond what the most imaginative officer could have conceived in those days. These innovations include facial recognition software, which has proved its worth as a crime-fighting resource since WE ADOPTED IT IN 2011.'
I am reminded of the 1956 Henry Fonda movie “The Wrong Man”, now multiplied exponentially.
The right to privacy, what’s that? In today’s world, it seems that the trendy thing is to get known, for something and posting your face on social media sites can lead to facial identification theft (FIT). For years millions of people on social media have posted their faces, family albums, vacation photos and everything else. The majority of smartphones have location, time and date stamps embedded in every photo. So is facial identification using AI to identify you, track you, and deny you everything from employment to a passport notwithstanding outright fraud and identity theft worth the risk or is it another way of making dollars to the highest bidder?
1. What is your privacy worth?
2. Are you being paid for the acquisition of your facial ID?
3. Are your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness being violated?
4. Are you willing to be arrested over AI’s suggested facial interpretation?
5. Are you willing to be harassed over your political preference by politicians (holding a picture of a democratic candidate in your photo with your face appearing in the photo), like Trump as an example?
Some or all this might sound crazy, but make no mistake your likeness is already being used for financial, political, or ideological political reasons to vilify you and destroy your credibility in some way.
1
I would like the thank the NYTimes for these series of articles on the dystopian threat of the latest crime fighting tool. I have made my career on analyzing the extreme reactions to the latest mod threat to our lives. Thanks to DNA swipes and later the Taser, I published a dozen articles on irrational reactions that usually last a decade after the technology's adoption and the NYTimes has always paid off with their unabated attention to the fad issue until its time for the next. So till the DNA vacuum is released in 2025, it looks like my latest data is on the irrational reactions to facial recognition.
1
For those of you who are bringing children into this world I ask, why? This “tool” for face recognition will be used to discriminate and incriminate the innocent.
1
Was a time, the US military – and our close allies – were “the” market for high-technology…
Followed years later by the US consumer market – and then, the rest of the world…
Today, it’s the other way around…
What’s happening here and now with facial-recognition technology is the same thing, but for homeland security…
The interesting nuance – our police forces welcome the technology, while our prosecutors and journalists keep trying to wave us off…
Are they the only ones among us who can handle the truth…
Or the ones whose standing and job security is most at risk…
Portrait painters at the time of Daguerre, and his type…
PS
If you find this hard to believe, look at what ground-truths we learned from 752’s black box, vs some bystander’s smartphone video clip…
And the first crash-scene photographs, with missile shards clearly visible…
While overlords played catchup in constructing a narrative…
This is absolutely frightening.
1
Deep fake videos + AI face recognition = the power to destroy people's lives
Soon we'll also be able to print fake DNA.
Law enforcement will have more information than ever, but nothing will be true.
5
NYTimes continued comparison of law enforcement use of photo images to the Chinese adoption of similar technology has really got me thinking about how we can stop this dystopian nightmare from happening here in the good old USA. I did some quick googling and found that the Chinese big brother just as often uses DNA, fingerprints, and footprint images in their trials of public opposition and ethnic minorities. To stop the same thing happening here, it is clear that we must ban the use of DNA, fingerprint, and footprint use by the police. We can either sit here and wait for big brother to take over or stop the use of any technology from helping in solving crimes! Course, Trump and his henchman also control enough tactical nuclear weapons to hold every blue state hostage, but they would never think of that in their dystopian scheming....it is quite obvious that they will hunt us down one facebook photo at a time. It is now or never to save America!
This is not about secrets, it's about thought crimes. We are already experimenting with "sexual assault by visual gaze," mistakenly called "male gaze" (which is really a theory of cinema). Next it will be, "My app knows what you were thinking, and it was inappropriate/offensive/illegal/etc."
1
Perhaps if we didn't post everything about ourselves on the public internet, we'd have a greater realization of privacy. It seems silly to expect privacy when we're the ones oversharing everything about our lives. If you don't want people to know all you personal details, and if you don't don't want applications like this to affect you, keep your details to yourself.
2
Weird. Aren't "conservatives" supposed to be against invasions of privacy? Again, the narrative changes to fit their purpose. Not coincidentally, it's the same purpose that erased fiscal responsibility from the historical platform.
5
I can hear them now, "but if you have nothing to hide, who cares?" Well, ask all of those exonerated by the Innocence Project what they think about "having nothing to hide" as a reason for giving up one's freedom.
3
The technology is evolving much faster than is a consensus as to how personal information should be used. Very few of us take privacy seriously, and certainly not to the extent that I have by shunning social media. Even so, I'm always amazed by what I can find online about myself, half of it outdated or outright wrong. There is so much potential for abuse.
Facial recognition is only going to become more accurate, more sophisticated and more common. I can foresee a time when DNA found at a crime scene will be used to reconstruct a person's facial appearance and to identify and find them. I have no problem with law enforcement using the tech to find a suspect, but I hope we never reach the point of misusing it to convict someone of a crime. Regardless, the constitutional ban on unreasonable search and seizure should apply to this technology and a search warrant should be required.
Roe v Wade was decided based on a constitutional right to privacy, yet such a right has never been applied to personal data or the internet. Perhaps it's time we amend the constitution to define the boundary between public and private information and to spell out exactly what the limits to invading one's personal privacy should be.
5
We need a Constitutional amendment - a Right of Privacy, which says that we, the people, own our data, and that no company can use it without our consent. China is by many accounts building a 'surveillance state' in some areas, with thousands of cameras tracking every person's presence. Combine this with software such as Clearview's program, and the government will be able to keep track of every person, everywhere. The potentials for abuse are evident and scary... things that can be done will eventually -be- done, that has become clear. The law, and our rights, need to protect us, before we have no rights at all.
5
Of course, law enforcement would like more personal information on more people. As a child in early 1960s, I remember queuing to get a measles shot. Police could likewise herd us for fingerprinting and mug shots. More arrests made. But is this good?
1
Catching bad guys is what the po po is supposed to do. If there is something out there that will help them, shouldn't they be allowed to use it? If you support the criminal element I am sure this technology scares you because it makes it difficult to get away with criminal behavior. If you have not committed a crime, this technology does not affect you.
1
We can all control our own privacy by being sensible about the use of social media.
Firstly, we have to stop using social media as a megaphone for social engagement. Secondly, if people are going to put sensitive information on a public site, then they should make sure that such sites protect the information.
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. protect little to no protection. So don't use them or at best, use them sparingly. Just because Tobacco is available does not mean that you have to puff. People like Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey don't have your safety in mind. They care only about the size of their personal assets.
2
When Facebook's face recognition technology identified, in error, a local political official's face as belonging to my grandmother, the software automatically tagged him as my grandmother. While the technology is improving in accuracy all of the time, out of 7 billion people in this world, how many billion reference points on a face would be needed to peg a person as unique?
We should have immediate concerns for the innocent doppelgangers of criminals, innocent people who are likely to be, at the least, inconvenienced by a probe according to face appearance. They might have to hire a lawyer, spend time in court, and then be wrongly convicted. This inconveniencing is a new external cost in our society. Do these costs weigh with the benefits to law enforcement?
Just think of all of the people inconvenienced because their names resemble terrorist names, or names of illegal immigrants that have already been deported. The trend to identify criminals by way of DNA using family ancestry sites is also a disturbing trend likely to inconvenience the innocent.
This power shift is liken to the genetic war between predator and prey. With each new sophisticated development in a prey becoming more elusive, the predator develops the tools to match. In this case, in a world where no one can be completely anonymous, and for very little cost to the predator law enforcement, the power has shifted greatly. This means we might as well be in cages, imprisoned pets of the powerful.
1
When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a 2009 CNBC interview about concerns over his company’s retention of user data, he infamously replied: « If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place ».
When I hear people dismiss the importance of privacy because « they have nothing to hide », I’m convinced that even they do not believe the things they say. Anti-privacy advocates have often gone to great lengths to maintain control over the visibility of their own behavior. Those internet tycoons who are so willing to devalue our privacy are vehemently protective of their own. They say things to friends, psychologists and lawyers that they do not want anyone else to know. They give voice to thoughts online that they do not want associated with their names.
The point is that the desire for privacy is shared by us all as an essential part of what it means to be human. The private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eye of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.
What is particularly worrisome about this AI facial recognition technology is the potential of abuse by vindictive officials to do things like gain private information about political opponents or to silence any dissent. Regardless of how surveillance is used or abused, the limits it imposed on freedom are intrinsic to its existence.
9
Technology causes invasions of privacy but it also makes some types of crimes easier. Look at the proliferation of child pornography due to encrypted messaging (something the NYT recently covered.) The cat is out of the bag in terms of privacy so law enforcement does need tools to combat the crime that is out there. Also, won't facial recognition protect some people? If often unreliable witnesses misidentify a suspect, couldn't these facial images, just like DNA evidence, exonerate the wrongly accused? Clearly any image won't work. Like any tool, it has to be used carefully. Watchdog groups need to be ahead of this issue and come up with safeguards now, as well as perhaps ways to employ it to defend suspects or identify abusive law enforcement officers, because the technology is being used and no one will stop using it.
all those who think because they've never been on FB, never used their real names online or that voting for someone else will make a difference are in deep denial.
Having read the article. It’s clear Mr That has one simple goal. To make a pile of money.
Mr That neither cares about an individual’s privacy, nor does he care about the untold damage his little company could do to individuals who are mistakenly identified.
I would like to think stringent laws will be passed by Congress to stop the likes of Mr That from creating this Orwellian nightmare.
Cynically , I fear that many who work in the tech industry appear to have no moral compass. Except, to make money piles of money, at the cost of an individual’s personal privacy.
11
There is no time point where man did not try to get an upper hand over others. It is sad. Bad habits are in us all. Privacy, I believe we as humans never had it.
The Grifter in Chief has impacted my sleep pattern and this will add to my tossing and turning.
I wish for the recent past when news had a more mundane pattern to it.
1
There will come a moment in the the not to distant future that we will come to realize that the individual autonomy that our society prides itself on has disappeared and we will understand at that moment that it was not stolen from us at gun point but given away freely one screen swipe at a time.
5
I recommend viewing "The Wrong Man," a film by Alfred Hitchcock. It gives a chilling picture of what happens when a man is falsely identified for murder---I cannot reveal the ending as it would be a spoiler. A very appropriate movie (made in 1956), long before today's dystopian technology.
2
Where is Sophocles when we need him? Because one can do something, make money and not break laws, someone does it and it's someone else's responsibility to think about the broader consequences. It's like my community where everyone laments the loss of neighborhood character and community, but to get a little more money they sell to an out-of-state developer who's going to raze the property and "maximize value" by putting up condos.
If we had leaders with the character of Jimmy Carter, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, it would create a stimulus at least for people to think twice before starting businesses like this one, or countless other dystopian ones, that are just waiting for the right matching of entrepreneurial and venture capital ambitions.
When all air was clean and everyone had their privacy, clean air and privacy had no economic value. Now they're commodities in new markets of economic opportunity. Welcome to David Brooks' capitalistic utopia.
8
As with Cambridge Analytica, one peels back the layers to find, again, that the root of the problem here is Facebook, the data it collects on people, and the data it hands out to bad actors like Ton-That and his shady investors.
We need a government that will take on Facebook, dismantle it, and wipe the data, before more innocent people get their privacy and civil rights violated.
11
We have the Constitutional means to stop invasion of privacy but not the will.
Our identity, privacy and thoughts are being violated. Privacy is no longer guaranteed as all web sites track your every keystroke. Browse the web and your thoughts, via casual searches, websites visited, etc are monitored and played back via advertising. Anywhere a computer is used you are subjected to unreasonable search and seizure. There is no privacy.
The Founding Fathers anticipated this as it applied to their experience with the British. They left us with a means to fight via the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It specifically excludes reference to a particular entity. The amendment declares a blanket, unequivocal right.
This amendment has been used to fight unreasonable search and seizure by the government. I believe it is more relevant than ever.
Read it and tell me why today’s lack of privacy via unreasonable search and seizure is any different. Ask yourself why this isn’t in front of the Supreme Court today? Are there no constitutional lawyers willing to take up the cause?
6
How will this app comply with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation? I do not want my personal data/photo scraped, especially when my privacy is supposed to be protected!
1
We should all be concerned about the total erosion of our privacy. While cameras in public places have either reduced crime or made the apprehension of criminals easier, the overall effect of this kind of technology is frightening.
While I resit and resent the idea of insurance companies wanting to monitor my driving habits, the thought of instant facial recognition is a further step in the wrong direction. Though I have nothing to hide, I don't want someone watching over my shoulder. It's creepy and demoralizing.
So this is what we have come to. In the name of law enforcement, we have opted to use tools that one day could be used against us by private organizations or the government.
I shudder to think what someone like Trump could do with this technology to bring down his enemies.
3
If you are not a criminal you should not care that this is used to thwart criminal behavior.
2
@Unhappy JD Except that it often identifies the wrong people. It picks out people who resemble the alleged criminal. Innocent people shouldn't have to be worried that a computer will wrongly identify them as suspects.
1
Wow! You have tremendous faith in the honesty & goodness of government. Read 1984. J. Edgar Hoover anyone?
At the holidays my daughter was in town. We talked about my tinnitus. She never texted the word tinnitus, she never emailed anybody about tinnitus. Within a couple of days she started getting ads about tinnitus treatment. Why? Because having Siri on your phone is like having a microphone on all your conversations. If they can hear you they can record it as well. Anybody else have this happen?
5
@Surfrank I don't have Siri and tinnitus ads have been showing up on almost every website I visit lately.
1
Yes. First noticed it several years ago and have since tested it. In our home, we presume every WiFi device can hear us, and that there are potential audio files storing what’s said in the privacy of our home. A storehouse of audio, video and image files waiting and ready to be searched by an app like CV.
5 years ago, I labeled such ideas as FB or its 3rd party apps “listening” or as cameras mounted on stoplights being a “threat to privacy” as conspiracy theories. Theory no more.
These are unsettling times.
I'm glad I have always been cautious about what I uploaded about myself and have never used an account under my real name. In this world it's now healthy to be a tad paranoid...
4
Lucky you! What about the rest of us? How about think beyond yourself, please!
"Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it."
Seriously? What is the law for, if not to head off dystopia?
11
@Khiyali
The law is for persecution of those opposed to their rulers. We do not need to hypothesize; we are living it. Today it’s Comey (not a sympathetic figure). Tomorrow it will be Greta. The day after tomorrow, it will be protesters against the Emperor in the Oval Office.
The use of this technology to deter and prevent crime may outweigh any potential privacy concerns.
2
No, there might be legitimate uses, but the abuses will far outweigh the good. I don't want some creep to identify my child and stalk them!
1
During the Vietnam era, police departments routinely photographed anti-war marches, and the FBI kept dossiers on protest leaders. Today, domestic terrorism laws passed to protect the security of the country in the wake of 9/11 have been broadened to apply to pipeline protests that threaten the profits of oil companies. The ability of software algorithms to deliver a list of the names and addresses of all participants at a political rally will have a chilling effect on the constitutional right of the people to peacefully assemble for a redress of grievances.
14
The truest quote in this article is “we are all screwed.”
People naturally want to control others, and will always justify any means to their ends.
3
If this technology is used consistently and in the right way, and saves one person from being falsely identified, falsely accused, and falsely sent to jail, then perhaps there is a place for it in our criminal justice system.
Really, do you BELIEVE that "man" will do the right thing? We have always taken something and twisted it into something other. The software will start as something good and changed to whatever it can be used as to circumvent the system.
1
@Lisa Veaz
In the unlikely event that this is only ever used to identify and prosecute criminals, it will more often lead to false positives and prosecution of the innocent than it will lead to exculpating falsely accused. And do keep in mind that Trump believes his opponents are criminals simply for being his opponents. I hope some clever programmer can figure out a way that each of us can thwart this recognition software without having to undergo surgical reconstruction of facial bones.
@Lisa Veaz
Turn that around. If you have one person misidentified, and falslely accused, and sent to jail is there still a place for this system? One that is so prone to abuse and overreach as others have brought up
George Orwell (1984) and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) were men born far ahead of their time. Turns out they were prophets, not just writers. They tried to tell us, but we didn't pay attention.
17
Privacy went out the window with the greatest law enforcement tool of all time...the license plate.
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@Kevin Banker, let’s not forget fingerprints and DNA. It’s like natured fated us to be fingered.
This is not new, weapon manufacturers make money at the expense of their victims with no moral qualms. But for every weapon there is a counter weapon - it shouldn't be too difficult to defeat Mr. Hoan's software by adding minimal artificial facial features that will throw off his genius invention. Isn't ironic it was conceived by a model?
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You want privacy? Forget it, it doesn't exist.
Don't blame the technology, it's just a more efficient form of what government has always done. This is one genie that is most definitely _not_ going back in the bottle.
What government can do with the information, however, is a very different matter. If you want to protect your legal rights, in court or under arrest, you need to vote for leaders who respect your legal rights. That definitely is not the oligarchs who rule us today.
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Defense contractors are already in the business of building technology for the US government and other nations, for the purpose of maiming and killing. This includes weapons, information systems, and pretty much anything else required by a large organization. How do you think these companies are going to navigate the moral ambiguity of building software to identify bad guys? If you think it will give them pause, think again. This is only a question of who gets to the game first. You can guarantee that any number of these companies are already building software which can be used by military and civil organizations, by law enforcement and by oppressive regimes. If the technology can be built by a single 30 year old, consider what a data scientist at Palantir could do with all the resources at their disposal. There is no question as to whether or not this will be created and used.
Venmo already tells me more than I want to know. I am always a bit shocked that it tells me who everyone I know is paying to others. Privacy does not seem like a thing anymore; we are way past.
I've tried a couple facial recognition tools just for kicks. They haven't been all that accurate. Though I suppose that will improve over time.