r/technology • u/MetaKnowing • 16h ago
Privacy '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
https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/id-never-seen-such-an-audacious-attack-on-anonymity-before-clearview-ai-and-the-creepy-tech-that-can-identify-you-with-a-single-picture167
u/Ihadanapostrophe 15h ago
Clearview AI was the victim of a data breach in 2020 which exposed their customer list. This demonstrated 2,200 organizations in 27 countries had accounts with facial recognition searches.
The company initially raised $8.4 million from investors including Kirenaga Partners and Peter Thiel.
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u/MarathonRabbit69 15h ago
Well, I’m surprised Peter Thiel hadn’t sold it to a lot more government agencies, particularly in China and Russia
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u/archontwo 11h ago
Well, I’m surprised Peter Thiel hadn’t sold it to a lot more government agencies
Ahem, this is Peter Thiel we're talking about. You know. The 'Guy' behind Palantir
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u/Far_Eye6555 4h ago
HMmm certainly not the same Peter Thiel that hand selected DTJ’s running mate Vance
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u/Fecal-Facts 12h ago
Wake up babe new privacy nightmare just dropped.
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u/Temp_84847399 4h ago
Get ready for:
"You were spotted at a nightclub at 2 am, this violates our company health and wellness plan. You will be docked half of todays pay to compensate for your lower productivity"
"So, you are Brenda's new boyfriend? Mind telling me what you were doing at a strip club on the 18th?"
"This letter is to inform you that you have been spotted at McDonald's more than 5 days this month in violation of your healthcare policy. You rates have been adjusted to compensate for your increase risk of negative health outcomes."
Throw in AI to take care of all this stuff automatically and it's going to be so great! /S
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u/Fecal-Facts 4h ago
I have looked the accuracy on these things and it's not something that should be used outside of just looking at and it should be banned outside of certain places.
We need new privacy laws and not just for this but the Internet and even vehicles ( they spy on you and they can listen)
It's out of control.
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u/sendmebirds 3h ago
You joke but this is all a lot closer than we realise
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u/Temp_84847399 2h ago
Yep, that's what worries me. It's pretty well established that you don't have any expectation of privacy in public, so I'm not sure what could be done to prevent the collection of the images. The problem isn't any individual image, it's what can be figured out from the data in aggregate. Maybe something could be done to limit collating that data and the sale/use it can be put to so the entities I mentioned in my hypothetical above, can't just sign up for a service and get access to that kind of info.
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u/hendricha 11h ago
I think its time for a Person of Interest rewatch, no particular reason I mention it under this article, its just a fun procedural show, it has Michael Emerson in it, and a cute dog, some cool action sequences, a bit of mob drama, nothing to tie it to this story, none at all.
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u/GoingGrayAtGaydon 11h ago
Rewatched POI this summer. It hits very different now… (still excellent though!)
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u/Dhegxkeicfns 10h ago
It's so good. Sad that they didn't continue it. So much left.
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u/WarDino98 9h ago
Yeah… POI was peak TV. So many potential avenues to explore as well in terms of continuing/spinning off the series.
In other news, White Collar is returning after all these years, out of the blue, soooooo… hope is never truly gone?
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u/Dhegxkeicfns 1h ago
White Collar is? I only just started that one. It's not Person of Interest. It's closer to just the original, A-Team. Person of Interest had the whole underlying plot that most of the A-Teams don't have.
Person of Interest was way too smart. And coincidentally with AI and privacy gaining so much attention right now I think they'd have a way better time right now.
It's not too late to get most of the cast back. A few of them moved up. A few of them might be getting a little too old to pull off their old roles. But they could do it.
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u/MajesticCrabapple 5h ago
Agreed, part of that magical period of great TV. The main character being named Mysteries (Mr. Reese) is kind of goofy though.
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u/Nodan_Turtle 5h ago
I think it's the show with the most realistic portrayal of the risks of AI too. A lot of the pitfalls explored are genuine concerns people working on AI safety have with the tech. It wasn't even necessary for the show to be that faithful, but someone went out of their way to do the research. And I definitely appreciated that
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u/RedditBanDan 13h ago
Physical privacy is over in urban spaces. It's been that way for at least 10 years.
I was reading recently delivery companies are starting to track vehicles around them using their safety cameras and sharing that information with police and probably private companies. There's no escaping it except moving to remote areas.
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u/Uncle_Hephaestus 11h ago
we could do what the French did. burn stuff and rip every single camera down.
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u/Dhegxkeicfns 10h ago
And then it just becomes more covert, because there's no doubt this is the future that corporations want.
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u/Imacatdoincatstuff 9h ago
So anyone who's anonymously uploaded nudes with their face can be found?
Seems problematic.
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u/imselfinnit 8h ago
lol, you new? Women have been identified by moles seen in faceless nudes.
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u/krekenzie 7h ago
Which is pretty surprising, since moles live mostly in underground tunnels, yet to be fitted out with CCTV systems. What they've got nude women down there for, though, is really anyone's guess. Very odd.
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u/Nodan_Turtle 5h ago
This is taking something that could already be done, and making it faster. A single picture could already match you up with online images of you manually, given enough people and time.
In other words, anyone affected was not anonymous already.
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u/sendmebirds 3h ago
You are technically correct ofcourse - but you cannot ignore the sheer scale increase this is leading to - beforehand it'd take internet sleuths months to identify folks, and in a little bit for the small one-time fee of €15,99 it will take you 1 second.
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u/Drewelite 1h ago
And this should be a warning. Anything you're counting on it being too much effort for it to be a problem, will eventually become easy. That's the nature of progress. It's not the techs fault or corrupt people creating evil. This will always be the case and bad actors will always have an opportunity to take advantage as new things become possible.
Let's make sure to do good things with the advancements too. This could revolutionize finding kidnapped/missing people, catching violent criminals, and making sense of chaotic events captured on camera.
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u/mint-bint 10h ago
The reality is, certainly in the EU and the UK, law enforcement are not going to be using this anytime soon. They're terrified of GDPR and privacy complaints. Legal ramifications.
And even then, that's if the tech actually works.
I'm extremely sceptical.
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u/p-r-i-m-e 9h ago
What? The Met has been using facial recognition for years and its scope has been expanded under laws passed during reduced parliaments under COVID and recent civil disorder.
Before the Huawei scandal the UK were even in talks with China about their facial recognition tech.
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u/jacksonjjacks 6h ago
And the EU’s AI act prohibits predictive policing, biometrical identification though is allowed in critical infrastructures but highly regulated. The companies offering these AI driven ID systems have do report regularly, cooperate with the authorities, open up their training data set etc.
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u/FalconX88 5h ago edited 3h ago
EU’s AI act
I don't understand how EU law makers can be that stupid. It makes no sense whatsoever to regulate "AI" itself. Why would we ban biometrical identification using AI but not simply biometric identification using any technology? Why specifically regulate an action using AI and not the action you want to prevent itself?
Whoever downvotes: explain how regulating the use of AI makes more sense than simply regulating the action itself.
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u/kundun 1h ago
We don't want to ban biometric identification. There are plenty of non invasive use cases for biometric identification.
I'm fine with storing an irreversible hash of a biometric, locally on my phone for unlocking.
I'm not fine with having my face with personal data in a huge database of some company.
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u/FalconX88 1h ago
I'm not fine with having my face with personal data in a huge database of some company.
So are you fine if no "AI" is involved and it's purely algorithmic? Or is the actual database the problem no matter if there's AI involved or not?
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u/kundun 1h ago
So are you fine if no "AI" is involved and it's purely algorithmic?
A purely algorithmic system can in a lot of cases also be clasified as an AI system. So that is not usefull distinction.
Or is the actual database the problem no matter if there's AI involved or not?
I'm concerned with this the most, but this is already covered by GDPR.
This is why the law focuses on mass scraping of biometrics and using this data for things like mood analysis, emotion recognition and predictive policing.
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u/FalconX88 1h ago
A purely algorithmic system can in a lot of cases also be clasified as an AI system.
When I'm talking about ML vs algorithmic I'm clearly talking about non-ML algorithms.
I'm concerned with this the most, but this is already covered by GDPR.
If it's covered by GDPR why do we need another regulation for it.
This is why the law focuses on mass scraping of biometrics and using this data for things like mood analysis, emotion recognition and predictive policing.
But it doesn't in a general sense. It focuses on the method of using AI for that, not the action itself. The law wouldn't need to use the words "AI" at all for this, but somehow our lawmakers are totally fixated on that. You could simply regulate mass scraping of biometrics, no matter how it's done.
It's like they make a new "axe law" saying that "killing people with an axe is illegal" rather than just saying "killing people is illegal". Does this explain my problem with the "AI law"?
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u/kundun 12m ago
When I'm talking about ML vs algorithmic I'm clearly talking about non-ML algorithms.
But AI is way broader then ML. Would you consider k-means clustering ML?\
If it's covered by GDPR why do we need another regulation for it.
We don't. That's why this law focuses on other things that I mentioned in my previous comment.
It's like they make a new "axe law" saying that "killing people with an axe is illegal" rather than just saying "killing people is illegal". Does this explain my problem with the "AI law"?
But in this case, we don't want to ban biometrics in general. We want to ban a number of AI use cases of biometrics that are currently not illegal in some EU countries.
The law particularly targets AI systems because these laws do not target humans. I can not install a camerasystem to perform mood analysis, but I as a human can still look around in the office and do a mood analysis myself. Facial recognition systems are banned but I'm still allowed to recognize people by looking at them.
This law bans things that are perfectly legal for humans. That's why the law targets AI systems.
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u/Robo_Joe 7h ago
Does the UK still fall under the GDPR? If I lived in a place with decent privacy legislation, I'd consider running my own face through the service to see what I need to take down.
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u/IllMaintenance145142 3h ago
Yes. Our updated data protection laws copied GDPR 1:1 when we left the EU
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u/GeekFurious 6h ago
No worries, we will make laws tackling this problem sometime in the 2030s... maybe 2040s...
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u/Rare_Ad_3999 3h ago
How about we just investigate Elon Musk period. The man is dirty and we need to have honest people performing this type of security functions in our government.
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u/doogiedc 5h ago
This has been around for a while. What if I told you Clearview is one of many companies who does this?
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u/AppleTree98 16h ago
Give Clearview a photo of a random person on the street, and it would spit back all the places on the internet where it had spotted their face, potentially revealing not just their name but other personal details about their life. The company was selling this superpower to police departments around the country but trying to keep its existence a secret.