I Got My File From Clearview AI, and It Freaked Me Out
Here’s how you might be able to get yours
Have you ever had a moment of paranoia just before posting a photo of yourself (or your kid) on social media?
Maybe you felt a vague sense of unease about making the photo public. Or maybe the nebulous thought occurred to you: “What if someone used this for something?” Perhaps you just had a nagging feeling that sharing an image of yourself made you vulnerable, and opened you up to some unknowable, future threat.
It turns out that your fears were likely justified. Someone really has been monitoring nearly everything you post to the public internet. And they genuinely are doing “something” with it.
The someone is Clearview AI. And the something is this: building a detailed profile about you from the photos you post online, making it searchable using only your face, and then selling it to government agencies and police departments who use it to help track you, identify your face in a crowd, and investigate you — even if you’ve been accused of no crime.
I realize that this sounds like a bunch of conspiracy theory baloney. But it’s not. Clearview AI’s tech is very real, and it’s already in use.
