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> His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of tha

by oefrha 7y ago

> His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants. This doesn’t sound groundbreaking all and I’d be very surprised if FBI/NSA/DHS/Palantir didn’t already have a system like that. Maybe they were just reserved for higher-value targets. Of course, NSA isn’t gonna tell you what it has constructed until decades later, so claiming that this goes far beyond NSA capabilities is reckless at best and clueless at worst.

muro 7y ago
This was in "Better off Ted" - search by a photo of someone to find all online photos of the same. There was a great comment by another scientist on the team: "we finally killed privacy!"
jslabovitz 7y ago
What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies who are desperate to solve cases at the lowest cost. I think we (both here at HN and in the larger society) have this perception that police departments, etc., are part of a well-organized hierarchy of well-considered processes and technology that start at the FBI/NSA/etc and works its way down, all carefully vetted for technical and ethical standards, and disclosed to the public who is ostensibly their employer. The reality that I’ve seen is quite different. As the article points out, individual police departments (and their officers!) often independently research and procure services, based on hearsay and questionable morals. Does the service help ‘get the bad guys’? Then it’s good. Does the service obviously violate copyright and ToS agreements? Not our problem. I learned this when I built a scrappy little website for a one-man company who builds training kits for first responders. As low-tech as this site was (e.g., ordering the product entailed sending a purchase order by postal mail) I was struck by the apparent success of my client’s product: he had dozens of endorsements by apparently top-level influencers in the field, and didn’t have much competition. There were some certifications that he matched, but it didn’t seem all that hard to sell a few thousand dollars of technology to small/mid-level LEOs. (This isn’t a criticism of his product, which seemed fine and certainly didn’t involve privacy or surveillance technology.) The numbers in the article about Clearview’s services are in the same range — easy to justify if it’s only a few thousand a year and apparently produces good results.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  >>What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies who are desperate to solve cases at the lowest cost. Exactly. This is a prime example of commoditization. The product doesn't have to be sophisticated. Just good enough to handle the most common use cases reasonably well, at a cheap price.
choward 7y ago
I agree completely. I stopped reading the article after that. One of the most naive things I've read. Even if there writer is correct, how would you know? You wouldn't.
- dpflan 7y ago
  It is sensationalized. To think that public data has not been scraped and indexed by more capable entities feels naive and hard to believe.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    Clearly the author hasn't used Yandex image search.
  - ljw1001 7y ago
    That doesn't mean that every police station in the land should have it. And they could sell this to absolutely anyone if their policy revenues aren't sufficient. There was a story about Palantir selling its tech to a NY bank (Morgan, I think?), who used it on their staff. Just because the tech isn't ground breaking doesn't mean the application isn't a concern to society.
resfirestar 7y ago
>Maybe they were just reserved for higher-value targets That's just it, though. I think there is broad popular understanding that the FBI and NSA have just about any surveillance capabilities we can imagine. But, we think, they only use it to chase terrorists, maybe pedophiles. Local cops instantly identifying a shoplifter by matching the surveillance photo to a facebook photo still seems like sci-fi, even if it was increasingly "near future" sci-fi.
jandrewrogers 7y ago
Yes, a 3 billion image database is tiny. Some orgs run that many new images per day, they just aren't exploiting it in this way.

by oefrha 7y ago

muro 7y ago

This was in "Better off Ted" - search by a photo of someone to find all online photos of the same. There was a great comment by another scientist on the team: "we finally killed privacy!"

jslabovitz 7y ago

What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies who are desperate to solve cases at the lowest cost. I think we (both here at HN and in the larger society) have this perception that police departments, etc., are part of a well-organized hierarchy of well-considered processes and technology that start at the FBI/NSA/etc and works its way down, all carefully vetted for technical and ethical standards, and disclosed to the public who is ostensibly their employer. The reality that I’ve seen is quite different. As the article points out, individual police departments (and their officers!) often independently research and procure services, based on hearsay and questionable morals. Does the service help ‘get the bad guys’? Then it’s good. Does the service obviously violate copyright and ToS agreements? Not our problem. I learned this when I built a scrappy little website for a one-man company who builds training kits for first responders. As low-tech as this site was (e.g., ordering the product entailed sending a purchase order by postal mail) I was struck by the apparent success of my client’s product: he had dozens of endorsements by apparently top-level influencers in the field, and didn’t have much competition. There were some certifications that he matched, but it didn’t seem all that hard to sell a few thousand dollars of technology to small/mid-level LEOs. (This isn’t a criticism of his product, which seemed fine and certainly didn’t involve privacy or surveillance technology.) The numbers in the article about Clearview’s services are in the same range — easy to justify if it’s only a few thousand a year and apparently produces good results.

enraged_camel 7y ago
>>What’s groundbreaking here is not really the technology but rather the marketing: Clearview is selling a relatively cheap product to law enforcement agencies who are desperate to solve cases at the lowest cost. Exactly. This is a prime example of commoditization. The product doesn't have to be sophisticated. Just good enough to handle the most common use cases reasonably well, at a cheap price.

choward 7y ago

I agree completely. I stopped reading the article after that. One of the most naive things I've read. Even if there writer is correct, how would you know? You wouldn't.

dpflan 7y ago
It is sensationalized. To think that public data has not been scraped and indexed by more capable entities feels naive and hard to believe.
- AJ007 7y ago
  Clearly the author hasn't used Yandex image search.
- ljw1001 7y ago
  That doesn't mean that every police station in the land should have it. And they could sell this to absolutely anyone if their policy revenues aren't sufficient. There was a story about Palantir selling its tech to a NY bank (Morgan, I think?), who used it on their staff. Just because the tech isn't ground breaking doesn't mean the application isn't a concern to society.

resfirestar 7y ago

>Maybe they were just reserved for higher-value targets That's just it, though. I think there is broad popular understanding that the FBI and NSA have just about any surveillance capabilities we can imagine. But, we think, they only use it to chase terrorists, maybe pedophiles. Local cops instantly identifying a shoplifter by matching the surveillance photo to a facebook photo still seems like sci-fi, even if it was increasingly "near future" sci-fi.

jandrewrogers 7y ago

Yes, a 3 billion image database is tiny. Some orgs run that many new images per day, they just aren't exploiting it in this way.