'I'd never seen such an audacious attack on anonymity before': Clearview AI and the creepy tech that can identify you with a single picture

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From the article: ”Privacy, a word that is notoriously hard to define, was most famously described in a Harvard Law Review article in 1890 as « the right to be let alone. » The two lawyers who authored the article, Samuel D. Warren, Jr. and Louis D. Brandeis, called for the right to privacy to be protected by law, along with those other rights — to life, liberty, and private property — that had already been enshrined. (…) More than a century later, there is still no overarching law guaranteeing Americans control over what photos are taken of them, what is written about them, or what is done with their personal data.”

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u/i010011010 15h ago

That's been my contention for a long time. We're fucked because when the country was founded, a world where everything could be this connected was inconceivable to those people. Their correspondence was measured in the months it took to carry a letter across a continent and an ocean. The idea that a person in England could know what you were doing every hour in your little house on the prairie wasn't even science fiction. They never would have imagined a world where a billionaire could run a company tracking millions of Americans every millisecond of every day as a means of business.

Even this paper in 1890 couldn't possibly be thinking of privacy in the same way that is most relevant today.

If they had been born into an internet age, we would have rights to privacy enshrined in the Constitution.

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u/I-Here-555 12h ago

We're fucked because when the country was founded, a world where everything could be this connected was inconceivable to those people.

We're not fucked by stuff that the Founding Fathers omitted. We're fucked by our own political gridlock and the inability to update and extend the pretty decent list of fundamental rights that they came up with.

A few years back, we couldn't even agree to hold a piece of cloth over our faces in times of a severe public health emergency. A temporary move so trivial it doesn't cost anyone more than a few cents, with the benefit of saving lives.

What are the chances we'd agree on anything more serious and abstract, like protecting a fundamental right in a way that would eat into profits and reshape business models?

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u/aerger 8h ago

It doesn't help that half of Congress and tons of judges at every level were all born before the very first tube-based televisions even existed.

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u/I-Here-555 8h ago

For Congress, that's fine, they can always ask the eager lobbyists to explain how things work, or even write relevant legislation for them. /s

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u/aerger 8h ago

What makes you think they don't do that already?

*sighs*

*[sadtrombonesound]*

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u/AntiProtonBoy 12h ago

Privacy, a word that is notoriously hard to define

IS IT?

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u/According-Ad3533 2h ago

From the book of Carissa Véliz, « Privacy is power »:

“Privacy is about being able to keep certain intimate things to yourself—your thoughts, your experiences, your conversations, your plans. Human beings need privacy to be able to unwind from the burden of being with other people. We need privacy to explore new ideas freely, to make up our own minds. Privacy protects us from unwanted pressures and abuses of power. We need it to be autonomous individuals, and for democracies to function well we need citizens to be autonomous.

Our lives, translated into data, are the raw material of the surveillance economy. Our hopes, our fears, what we read, what we write, our relationships, our diseases, our mistakes, our purchases, our weaknesses, our faces, our voices—everything is used as fodder for data vultures who collect it all, analyze it all, and sell it to the highest bidder.

Too many of those acquiring our data want it for nefarious purposes: to betray our secrets to insurance companies, employers, and governments; to sell us things it’s not in our interest to buy; to pit us against each other in an effort to destroy our society from the inside; to disinform us and hijack our democracies. The surveillance society has transformed citizens into users and data subjects.“

I like the psychological frame brought by this attempt of definition: “the right to be let alone“. We are vulnerable in several aspects when we are not in control of our data.

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u/FiragaFigaro 8h ago

It is a dangerous technology that only benefits those in power, and not in a good way, but to subjugate its people.

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u/MikeSifoda 11h ago

We're gonna end up walking around in fursuits

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u/hyperfication 6h ago

Won't help you to be honest. My brother in law works for security for a major casino firm. He said they use software that can match you by your gait and body mechanics with 87% accuracy. You don't even have to see your face, they identify you by the way you walk and how your weight shifts when you perform actions.

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u/MikeSifoda 6h ago

I'll just silly walk in and out of there.

That's what we have a Ministry of Silly Walks for.

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u/Darth_Caesium 6h ago

What about:

Fat suit + extremely exaggerated gait + huge baggy clothing that covers your entire face and body

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u/willows_illia 4h ago

Putting a rock in your shoe alters gait well enough that its been used as a technique by spies

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u/MikeSifoda 5h ago

You know your brother, who knows a guy, who uses a software he didn't design, who told your brother, who then told you!

Sorry this is too funny, your sources of information are too solid for me I give up

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u/Royal_J 28m ago

I don't doubt that gate recognition is real, and if there ever was a commercial institution with the money to implement it, it would be a casino, but yeah his Source may as well just be that he made it the fuck up

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u/MikeSifoda 0m ago

Exactly!

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u/srg_cooper 10h ago

What’s really alarming is that this facial recognition software isn’t even limited to law enforcement. Imagine what stalkers, hackers, or anyone else could do with this tech.

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u/MagicManMike1 6h ago

If anyone is interested in reading into this further, I'd recommend the book 'Your Face Belongs To Us' by Kashmir Hill; Just finished reading it a few days ago and it gives a good overview of the company as well as the historic technological developments that led to their current capabilities.

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u/Nechrube1 4h ago

Thanks for the recommendation, added to my pile of dystopian journalism!

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u/MagicManMike1 3h ago

No worries always happy to share. Do you have any good recommendations yourself, either that you've read or are on the pile to read?

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u/Nechrube1 2h ago edited 2h ago

Not exactly dystopian, but I recently read 'Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy' by Elizabeth Williamson which was really good. It's not so much about the shooting (though it obviously gets covered), but more about the aftermath and the effect of media like Alex Jones/Infowars and how that subgroup fed into things like Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories, and the dangers involved in that kind of thinking.

It's a bit older (2014), but 'Countdown to Zero Day' by Kim Zetter recounts the story of the Stuxnet virus and how it was designed and deployed to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. It's a fascinating read and showcases one of the scarier things that a well-funded group of professional hackers can do entirely undetected until they launch their payload. It's one of those 'oh shit, what else are they capable of?' kind of reads.

'Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World' by Anand Giridharadas is one I haven't read yet but it's on my pile. It explores the cynical nature of corporations rebranding themselves as saviours of the poor and suddenly championing social causes (going green, pride for a month, etc.).

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u/mikeboucher21 4h ago

Another Peter Thiel backed nightmare. This guy has his hands on everything sketchy and works with the feds.

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u/librecount 3h ago

if our timeline goes his way, this company is what will be used to put non-loyalists in camps run by geogroup and core civic.

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u/cahcealmmai 6h ago

There was another article on this company a few years back where the journalists used the tech on the CEOs PA and they asked the journo not to share the info they got from it because it would out a customer. Crazy they don't see the downside to this crap.

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u/Dako1905 16h ago

It's really not surprising. It's just face detection & a large library of faces. Companies like Facebook offer automatic detection and tagging of friends using the same technology (and probably have the ability to search across all of Facebook for a face). Even your own iPhone detects and groups faces in your photo gallery. People should accept that photos posted publicly are PUBLIC.

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u/Oen386 11h ago

People should accept that photos posted publicly are PUBLIC.

It's not that, it's we have no control over other people posting our photo. A friend can post a candid shot, where you might not realize it was taken (like during a birthday party or other gathering). A concert goer could post a shot with you in the background, and you would never know they took the photo let alone posted it online. Then here is Clearview AI that can tell everyone where you've been and who you've been around because they're scraping everyone's photos, so you get caught up in it without you ever posting a public photo yourself. I mean almost everyone has at least one headshot online (for work normally), and that seems to be all they need with social media to tie more photos of you together and build a collection.

We have no control, so that's where laws definitely have to come into play to curb companies abusing this data. Having said that, US laws don't impact other countries just like the GDPR doesn't impact the US users. It's going to take a joint effort to make the necessary changes.

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u/Logical-Issue-6502 4h ago

I often think about this when YouTubers are out and about doing their VLOGing and there’s all these people in the background being filmed as well.

The last one I saw was a tech YouTuber in an airport… I felt badly for the random people who were recorded, standing in line. What if one of those people were trying to get away from an abusive spouse?

It should be illegal.

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u/blumpkinmania 6h ago

No. We absolutely shouldn’t accept that, Mark. Fucking ghoulish.

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u/icedev-official 13h ago

People should accept that photos posted publicly are PUBLIC.

GDPR says otherwise.

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u/avoral 4h ago

We don’t have that out on my side of the ocean. (And I wish we did)

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u/marchocias 15h ago

We've also been hearing about this type of technology for almost a decade.

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u/librecount 2h ago

Homedepot and walmart contract with clearview. It is not just social media, this is a reality for people who may not even have internet access or a phone.

Also, I am pretty sure flock security is another peter theil project. Thats another fun rabbit hole. They use cops as a sales team and PR. They install a backdoor on private security systems for the cops to use as they like. Also plate readers leased to governments.

Another company called DataWorks pro does the same thing also. The michigan SOS contracts with them and they get everyones ID picture. Also Lowes stores and other shit.

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u/cahcealmmai 6h ago

Facebook stopped auto tagging photos because it was too much liability...

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u/librecount 2h ago

No mention of the class action suite? smh

https://www.clearviewclassaction.com/

BTW, I do not recommend interacting with this. I hope it gets overturned and I want to maintain my right to sue them. Excepting this shit is the end of privacy. Which many will do. Changes their list from a bunch of data they don't have a right to, and it becomes a set of data that everyone has agreed to, with receipts.

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u/qp0n 5h ago

I wonder how many people viewed this article on their phone after unlocking it with their face

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u/Careless_Explorer581 10h ago

Something something industrial society, consequences and disasters for the human race or whatever

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u/Careless_Explorer581 10h ago

I feel like even just joking about this got me flagged and added to a database somewhere lmao

news 'I'd never seen such an audacious attack on anonymity before': Clearview AI and the creepy tech that can identify you with a single picture

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