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Only the Government Can Save Us From Clearview A.I.
And how to stop the end of anonymity
This story was written in response to the article “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It” by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times.
If you’re still unsure why privacy is so damn important, my guess is you’re one of these people whom Kara Swisher described last year:
Far too many of the people who have designed the wondrous parts of the internet — thinking up cool new products to make our lives easier, distributing them across the globe, and making fortunes doing so — have never felt unsafe a day in their lives.
I’d personally given up on trying to convince people that privacy was everyone’s problem until I came across this brilliant piece of investigative reporting:
Truly, what could be more insidious and dystopian than a Peter Thiel-backed startup — co-founded by Rudy Giuliani’s former aid — that combines A.I. and facial recognition to help cops match photos of unknown people to their photos scraped from Facebook and other social media sites? Obviously, without their consent.
The company, called Clearview, licenses its product to law enforcement agencies, and Hill writes that in the past year, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview without public scrutiny. And though law enforcement use of facial recognition technology isn’t new, access to this quantum of searchable photos is. As Hill pointed out with documents she’d received and posted in the Times, Clearview’s product is a game-changer for law enforcement.
When I read this article, I was mortified, but it was hard to know who to blame. The founders of Clearview, of course, for even coming up with such an invasive product, but given the United States’ capitalistic culture (money over morals, computer science over civics), lack of regulation (what privacy?), and easy access to computers (A.I. for everyone!), it was only a matter of time before this product was built…
