Is there any way out of Clearview’s facial recognition database?
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/22522486/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-avoid-escape-privacy
Reported today in The Verge.
Is there any way out of Clearview's facial recognition database?
In March 2020, two months after The New York Times exposed that Clearview AI had scraped billions of images from the internet to create a facial recognition database, Thomas Smith received a dossier encompassing most of his digital life.
Using the recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act, Smith asked Clearview for what they had on him. The company sent him pictures that spanned moments throughout his adult life: a photo from when he got married and started a blog with his wife, another when he was profiled by his college's alumni magazine, even a profile photo from a Python coding meetup he had attended a few years ago.
"That's what really threw me: All the things that I had posted to Facebook and figured, 'Nobody's going to ever look for that,' and here it is all laid out in a database," Smith told The Verge.
Clearview's massive surveillance apparatus claims to hold 3 billion photos, accessible to any law enforcement agency with a subscription, and it's likely you or people you know have been scooped up in the company's dragnet. It's known to have scraped sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram, and is able to use profile names and associated images to build a trove of identified and scannable facial images.
Little is known about the accuracy of Clearview's software, but it appears to be powered by a massive trove of scraped and identified images, drawn from social media profiles and other personal photos on the public internet. That scraping is only possible because social media platforms like Facebook have consolidated immense amounts of personal data on their platforms, and then largely ignored the risks of large-scale data analysis projects like Cle