Too often, facial recognition feels like a mysterious, society-pervading technology that is too complex for individuals to understand or combat. We read about scary new applications of the tech and its increasingly concerning role in determining who gets a job, who gets a loan, or even who gets arrested. Because facial recognition is often mobilized by governments and massive corporations, though, it’s easy for individuals to feel powerless in the face of these technologies.

But we’re not powerless. New laws, new tech, and new collective action movements are giving consumers the tools we need to fight back against indiscriminate or…

The day after my wife delivered our first baby, a photographer knocked on the door of our hospital room and offered to take pictures. We were sleep-deprived, dazed from the realization that everything we once considered “normal” had just been smashed with a sledgehammer, and emotionally speaking, we were puddles of liquid. Of course, we let her in.

Later on, when I looked over the terms of service on the photographer’s company-issued iPad, I noticed that one of the default checked boxes authorized it to use the photos in online marketing materials. Without hesitating, I unchecked it and told the…

In a new piece on Debugger, OneZero’s consumer tech publication, our columnist Owen Williams writes about his decision to buy a GPS tracker that attaches to his dog’s collar: “Honestly, I felt silly buying a GPS tracker at first, given I’d have reservations about attaching it to a child if I had one. But the peace of mind with a young dog has been worth it.”

It’s a great story that speaks to a very simple trade-off many of us make all the time: privacy for safety and convenience. Owen doesn’t think he’d attach a tracker to a human child…

General Intelligence

ImageNet is arguably the most important dataset in recent A.I. history. It’s a collection of millions of images that were compiled in 2009 to test a simple idea: If a computer vision algorithm had more examples to learn from, would it be more accurate? Were the underperforming algorithms of the day simply starved for data?

To encourage others to test the same hypothesis, the authors of ImageNet started a competition to see who could train the most accurate algorithm using the dataset. By 2012, results from the academic competition had attracted the full attention of tech industry giants, who began…

Jules Polonetsky remembers the moment that shattered his naivete about the internet.

“I was the consumer affairs commissioner for New York City 20 years ago when some company I’d never heard of came in with a big billboard,” he recalls. “It said, ‘Welcome to Silicon Alley,’ sponsored by DoubleClick.” I’d read in the headlines that DoubleClick was in trouble for using something called cookies. And something to do with “appending your identity” to your web-browsing history.

DoubleClick was a pioneer in targeted advertising: It used cookies to track people around the web for the benefit of advertisers across its vast…

General Intelligence

Though most Americans have likely never heard of it, Illinois’ 12-year-old Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has proven itself to be the country’s strongest legal barrier against the unfettered collection of fingerprint, iris, voice, and facial recognition data.

Other states have taken notice. California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) included biometric data in its broad set of privacy protections when it went into effect in 2020, and just last week Virginia passed its own data privacy act, which experts say is largely modeled on California’s. …

In late February, I went to an office building in San Ramon, California. I used to work there, before the pandemic, and needed to pick up some mail. Due to a standing Covid-19 public health order in the Bay Area, the building’s management had implemented mandatory mask and temperature checks at the entrance, so I expected to be scanned and evaluated.

I didn’t expect that the scan would be performed by a machine—or that consenting to a scan might enter me into a facial recognition database, which could later be used to monitor my health status and track my every…

General Intelligence

OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.

Facebook researchers announced a breakthrough yesterday: They have trained a “self-supervised” algorithm using 1 billion Instagram images, proving that the algorithm doesn’t need human-labeled images to learn to accurately recognize objects.

Typically, the most accurate image recognition algorithms require humans to label images as containing dogs, horses, people, or any other subject, and then the algorithm can find similarities between images humans have indicated contain the same objects. Facebook’s chief A.I. scientist Yann LeCun has been on a mission to change…