6 ms·

The file Clearview AI has been keeping on me

152 points by _Microft 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
beholder1 7y ago
The work of this system does not seem different from what's known of chinese face detection and surveillance systems.
luckydata 7y ago
Until our way of governing ourselves doesn't change, everything scientists and engineers do can and will be converted into a weapon or tool of oppression. We should be more vigilant and we should demand better from our elected officials.
- pstuart 7y ago
  We should always demand this, yet not count on it happening. It would be nice to find ways to take these weapons and use them for self-defense as well. I wish I had a clue of what that would look like.
  - leggomylibro 7y ago
    It would probably look like someone publishing the realtime location and browsing histories of powerful public figures. But good luck with that; there's a reason why that sort of information isn't sold on a per-person basis.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    Well, the one edge of this sword is essentially being used by wealthy, businesses and those in power to gain additional information on average citizens to leverage for their own advantages and the expense of those folks happiness. Traditionally, an average person had a tremendous amount of privacy simply by the virtue of being average. It wasn't worth the time/effort/resources to collect data on them. With ubiquitous sensors, it's now far more manageable or even trivial to collect data on people and use it no matter how unimportant or insignificant you are in respect to money/power. People of great wealth and power also somewhat enjoy this privacy. Unless you're a public facing official or on the top of the wealthy list, you essentially can also disappear in crowds and enjoy a degree of anonymity. Some may recognize Gates or Bezos in a crowd but drop down to say Forbes 400 rank... #144 (picked at random) and you'll find.. (searching) Leonard Sterm. Prior to that sentence I've never heard that name and certainly wouldn't recognize him in public even though he is estimated to be worth a modest $4.8B. I might (probably not) interact with them in the future and as an average person, I'm at a disadvantage because I can't recognize his net worth and public information which I could potentially leverage to my advantage in the same fashion someone wealthy/powerful may use their resources to leverage me. Take this a step further and focus on business investors and participants promoting these technologies, pouring money into them. For example, I can't even name the people involved in Cambridge Analytica even though they were in the news and probably wouldn't recognize them either. Sure, I can dig around and find them but that wouldn't be useful in most situations. For the most part, your average person doesn't have knowledge or resources to access and leverage such data that businesses are starting to use against the average consumer and worker rapidly and in ways that significantly impact their quality of life. As such, I would propose leveraging these same identification and recognition approaches against those pulling the strings or in public government office positions who should be fighting for citizens rights and developing a targeted dataset for those folks and exposing it in a way your average citizen could use it. Perhaps as a phone app that can pass a few frames of sampled video back to a service that identifies these individuals and gives detailed public information about them. Make their anonymity suffer. Link it to public facing records of their history, etc. Develop network information for their families, friends, business associates. Obviously, this is worthless against high profile individuals (celebrities, high government officials, etc.), but a lot of wealth and power hides in the shadows of the general public's eyes yet are pulling the strings on these cultural shifts us plebes are dealing with. Turn the tables and make the technology problematic for their daily lives as well--drag them out into the light for the public--maybe then you'll see more regulation and penalties for using these technologies surface. Just a thought.
    - pstuart 7y ago
      I think you've got something there. This would likely need to leverage decentralized tech (perhaps blockchain could actually be useful for something other than crypto-currency?). Then there are the challenges of getting people to pay attention and to care about the results.
chris_f 7y ago
I don't see it get mentioned much, but Yandex's reverse image search [0] will also match similar facial images. It works surprisingly well. Other search images can obviously perform this function, but I think most stay away from it because of the creepy factor. [0] https://yandex.com/images/ https://yandex.com/images/ - click on the camera for the reverse image search
- simion314 7y ago
  Just tested it, it returns people with some similar features but that are obvious different persons, different face shape and size , maybe facial hair and glasses confuses it or they could not find any better matches so they returned just something so it is not empty.
  - jsjddbbwj 7y ago
    I tried it before and found it absolutely amusing because it would find tons of doppelgangers of any person.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I tried it with a picture of me and the top half dozen photos were, in fact, pictures of me. I was originally thinking there were also bizarrely a couple of photos of signs and then I realized I was standing next to a sign in the photo and that's what caused the algorithm to stick a couple of signs in there.
- fortran77 7y ago
  Amazing! I just tried it on a picture of me, and it found several other photos of me that I had no idea were on the Internet, and a few photos of people that looked so much like me that I thought it was until I took a close look.
bsanr2 7y ago
Can anyone chime in on why California's law is necessary to force the deletion of your data? Wouldn't these photos be subject to copyright law?
- simion314 7y ago
  From what someone said in a previous thread the copyright part is not that simple, so as an example the person that takes the picture can claim the copyright not the subject. Probably there is a different law that would prevent others to make money using your image but is not the copyright AFAIK
  - guitarbill 7y ago
    But selfies would be pretty unambiguous, no? Maybe even enough to get the ball rolling on a class-action, if enough Californians requested their data and got back a bunch of selfies. I'd also like to see what would happen if Europeans reported them to their data protection agencies. Nothing will happen to the company, since it's in the US, but it might make the life of the execs hard if they ever wanted to do business in Europe.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >Probably there is a different law that would prevent others to make money using your image but is not the copyright AFAIK There is a right of publicity [1] that tends to come into play if I want to use a photo of you for commercial purposes like advertising. However, if I sell a candid photo of you that I took in public to a newspaper or if it's in a book I sell that's OK. (Assume it's straightforward use and nothing that could be misconstrued or deliberately misrepresents you in some way.) No idea about this case and IANAL. But it seems in general that I would be able to freely use images on the Internet for training models and for other purposes that don't involve republishing those images. [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-publicity.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-publicity....
llarsson 7y ago
Google has all the data and algorithmic chops required for this, too. Just use their reverse image search feature, as helpfully explained here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1325808?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1325808?co=GENIE... They have tons of images from social media sites, too.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Google actually already does image recognition internally, and they did it for at least 5+ years.
- danso 7y ago
  But image similarity is not the same as face recognition. I just uploaded the photo the author gave to Clearview, and it returned none of the photos Clearview found – just other front-facing flatly-lit mugshots of other people. Of course Google can do this internally (and FAcebook could do it even better) – but the public-facing image search does not do what Clearview purports to do.
extesy 7y ago
Shortcut to the page with data access and opt out request forms: https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests
- yoaviram 7y ago
  Or send them a CCPA / GDPR erasure request: https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai
spectramax 7y ago
How do we stop this? Can we sue Clearview through EFF with the grounds of violating copyright or some weird law? California/GDPR laws are great but they don't stop the data collection, merely allow the user to access it. We need to make companies like Clearview completely and unquestionably illegal. I am infuriated and don't know what we can do.
- ajaygeorge91 7y ago
  stop uploading your pics to internet then
  - pravda 7y ago
    Or, upload your pictures, and misname them.
    - Bnshsysjab 7y ago
      That doesn’t fix facial matching.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Exactly! People think the Internet is like Disneyland but it's actually more like the bad parts of Bangkok. Somewhere between the inter-networked machines and peoples' minds some kind of magical thinking takes over. Why don't normal people understand that they are being actively fought by organized relentless enemies? In the old days cities had walls around them, I think we're barely getting to that point on the internet now, despite repeated and continuous raids by all kinds of marauders.
    - pergadad 7y ago
      Or the digital world is an incredibly huge and complicated place that most people don't even begin to grasp. What is private and public is not obvious, and everything can quickly leak, be accidentally shared, ... And you lose control. Stop blaming the users for what is systemic and legal faults - and in many cases really an issue not even of laws or of enforcement. Think revenge porn - nothing you can do to stop it, and only so much you can do to contain it once it's out there.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buckminster 7y ago
> "Clearview does not maintain any sort of information other than photos,” the company wrote. “To find your information, we cannot search by name or any method other than image." So a police force buys this product, searches for an image, and just gets more images. Really? What use would that be?
- Donald 7y ago
  It links you to the source of the image which is presumably subpoenable for identity information.
- throwGuardian 7y ago
  I think they also provide the origin of the images (example MySpace), and more often than not, the origin ends up with a definitive identity. The response report on the author, for instance, clearly identifies her
fortran77 7y ago
I like the way they claim it stops "child molesters" but then goes on to say that Macy's uses it, presumably to identify shoplifters before they strike.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> “Clearview helps to identify child molesters, murderers, suspected terrorists, and other dangerous people quickly, accurately, and reliably to keep our families and communities safe.” It helps to identify child molesters. "Think of the children".
kurthr 7y ago
It's worth noting (as mentioned they are under security review) that apparently ClearviewAI lost their client database (hopefully that's all) to hackers last week. Along with being sued by the big boys, that's gotta hurt. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/clearview-ai-loses-entire-database-of-faceprint-buying-clients-to-hackers/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/clearview-ai-los...
finnh 7y ago
Is it just me or are those results clearly based on using her name (from the ID she provided as part of her CCPA request)? To have zero false positives, and multiple different hair colors, etc ... strains credulity that is all based on face matching only.
ThePhysicist 7y ago
Supposedly any company in the EU that has data on you needs to proactively make you aware of this and allow you to have this data erased or rectified. I don’t think all or even most companies respect this rule yet (I haven’t heard of a single company about my data so far) but I think it’s a powerful idea that would keep companies like Clearview from being able to build up such large databases without people knowing about it. I really hope the EU will keep strengthening subject rights as I think it’s a very good solution to most problems involving the use of personal data.

152 points by _Microft 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

beholder1 7y ago

The work of this system does not seem different from what's known of chinese face detection and surveillance systems.

luckydata 7y ago

Until our way of governing ourselves doesn't change, everything scientists and engineers do can and will be converted into a weapon or tool of oppression. We should be more vigilant and we should demand better from our elected officials.

pstuart 7y ago
We should always demand this, yet not count on it happening. It would be nice to find ways to take these weapons and use them for self-defense as well. I wish I had a clue of what that would look like.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  It would probably look like someone publishing the realtime location and browsing histories of powerful public figures. But good luck with that; there's a reason why that sort of information isn't sold on a per-person basis.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Frost1x 7y ago
  Well, the one edge of this sword is essentially being used by wealthy, businesses and those in power to gain additional information on average citizens to leverage for their own advantages and the expense of those folks happiness. Traditionally, an average person had a tremendous amount of privacy simply by the virtue of being average. It wasn't worth the time/effort/resources to collect data on them. With ubiquitous sensors, it's now far more manageable or even trivial to collect data on people and use it no matter how unimportant or insignificant you are in respect to money/power. People of great wealth and power also somewhat enjoy this privacy. Unless you're a public facing official or on the top of the wealthy list, you essentially can also disappear in crowds and enjoy a degree of anonymity. Some may recognize Gates or Bezos in a crowd but drop down to say Forbes 400 rank... #144 (picked at random) and you'll find.. (searching) Leonard Sterm. Prior to that sentence I've never heard that name and certainly wouldn't recognize him in public even though he is estimated to be worth a modest $4.8B. I might (probably not) interact with them in the future and as an average person, I'm at a disadvantage because I can't recognize his net worth and public information which I could potentially leverage to my advantage in the same fashion someone wealthy/powerful may use their resources to leverage me. Take this a step further and focus on business investors and participants promoting these technologies, pouring money into them. For example, I can't even name the people involved in Cambridge Analytica even though they were in the news and probably wouldn't recognize them either. Sure, I can dig around and find them but that wouldn't be useful in most situations. For the most part, your average person doesn't have knowledge or resources to access and leverage such data that businesses are starting to use against the average consumer and worker rapidly and in ways that significantly impact their quality of life. As such, I would propose leveraging these same identification and recognition approaches against those pulling the strings or in public government office positions who should be fighting for citizens rights and developing a targeted dataset for those folks and exposing it in a way your average citizen could use it. Perhaps as a phone app that can pass a few frames of sampled video back to a service that identifies these individuals and gives detailed public information about them. Make their anonymity suffer. Link it to public facing records of their history, etc. Develop network information for their families, friends, business associates. Obviously, this is worthless against high profile individuals (celebrities, high government officials, etc.), but a lot of wealth and power hides in the shadows of the general public's eyes yet are pulling the strings on these cultural shifts us plebes are dealing with. Turn the tables and make the technology problematic for their daily lives as well--drag them out into the light for the public--maybe then you'll see more regulation and penalties for using these technologies surface. Just a thought.
  - pstuart 7y ago
    I think you've got something there. This would likely need to leverage decentralized tech (perhaps blockchain could actually be useful for something other than crypto-currency?). Then there are the challenges of getting people to pay attention and to care about the results.

chris_f 7y ago

I don't see it get mentioned much, but Yandex's reverse image search [0] will also match similar facial images. It works surprisingly well. Other search images can obviously perform this function, but I think most stay away from it because of the creepy factor. [0] https://yandex.com/images/ https://yandex.com/images/ - click on the camera for the reverse image search

simion314 7y ago
Just tested it, it returns people with some similar features but that are obvious different persons, different face shape and size , maybe facial hair and glasses confuses it or they could not find any better matches so they returned just something so it is not empty.
- jsjddbbwj 7y ago
  I tried it before and found it absolutely amusing because it would find tons of doppelgangers of any person.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I tried it with a picture of me and the top half dozen photos were, in fact, pictures of me. I was originally thinking there were also bizarrely a couple of photos of signs and then I realized I was standing next to a sign in the photo and that's what caused the algorithm to stick a couple of signs in there.
fortran77 7y ago
Amazing! I just tried it on a picture of me, and it found several other photos of me that I had no idea were on the Internet, and a few photos of people that looked so much like me that I thought it was until I took a close look.

bsanr2 7y ago

Can anyone chime in on why California's law is necessary to force the deletion of your data? Wouldn't these photos be subject to copyright law?

simion314 7y ago
From what someone said in a previous thread the copyright part is not that simple, so as an example the person that takes the picture can claim the copyright not the subject. Probably there is a different law that would prevent others to make money using your image but is not the copyright AFAIK
- guitarbill 7y ago
  But selfies would be pretty unambiguous, no? Maybe even enough to get the ball rolling on a class-action, if enough Californians requested their data and got back a bunch of selfies. I'd also like to see what would happen if Europeans reported them to their data protection agencies. Nothing will happen to the company, since it's in the US, but it might make the life of the execs hard if they ever wanted to do business in Europe.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ghaff 7y ago
  >Probably there is a different law that would prevent others to make money using your image but is not the copyright AFAIK There is a right of publicity [1] that tends to come into play if I want to use a photo of you for commercial purposes like advertising. However, if I sell a candid photo of you that I took in public to a newspaper or if it's in a book I sell that's OK. (Assume it's straightforward use and nothing that could be misconstrued or deliberately misrepresents you in some way.) No idea about this case and IANAL. But it seems in general that I would be able to freely use images on the Internet for training models and for other purposes that don't involve republishing those images. [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-publicity.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-publicity....

llarsson 7y ago

Google has all the data and algorithmic chops required for this, too. Just use their reverse image search feature, as helpfully explained here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1325808?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1325808?co=GENIE... They have tons of images from social media sites, too.

baybal2 7y ago
Google actually already does image recognition internally, and they did it for at least 5+ years.
danso 7y ago
But image similarity is not the same as face recognition. I just uploaded the photo the author gave to Clearview, and it returned none of the photos Clearview found – just other front-facing flatly-lit mugshots of other people. Of course Google can do this internally (and FAcebook could do it even better) – but the public-facing image search does not do what Clearview purports to do.

extesy 7y ago

Shortcut to the page with data access and opt out request forms: https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests

yoaviram 7y ago
Or send them a CCPA / GDPR erasure request: https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai

spectramax 7y ago

How do we stop this? Can we sue Clearview through EFF with the grounds of violating copyright or some weird law? California/GDPR laws are great but they don't stop the data collection, merely allow the user to access it. We need to make companies like Clearview completely and unquestionably illegal. I am infuriated and don't know what we can do.

ajaygeorge91 7y ago
stop uploading your pics to internet then
- pravda 7y ago
  Or, upload your pictures, and misname them.
  - Bnshsysjab 7y ago
    That doesn’t fix facial matching.
- carapace 7y ago
  Exactly! People think the Internet is like Disneyland but it's actually more like the bad parts of Bangkok. Somewhere between the inter-networked machines and peoples' minds some kind of magical thinking takes over. Why don't normal people understand that they are being actively fought by organized relentless enemies? In the old days cities had walls around them, I think we're barely getting to that point on the internet now, despite repeated and continuous raids by all kinds of marauders.
  - pergadad 7y ago
    Or the digital world is an incredibly huge and complicated place that most people don't even begin to grasp. What is private and public is not obvious, and everything can quickly leak, be accidentally shared, ... And you lose control. Stop blaming the users for what is systemic and legal faults - and in many cases really an issue not even of laws or of enforcement. Think revenge porn - nothing you can do to stop it, and only so much you can do to contain it once it's out there.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

buckminster 7y ago

> "Clearview does not maintain any sort of information other than photos,” the company wrote. “To find your information, we cannot search by name or any method other than image." So a police force buys this product, searches for an image, and just gets more images. Really? What use would that be?

Donald 7y ago
It links you to the source of the image which is presumably subpoenable for identity information.
throwGuardian 7y ago
I think they also provide the origin of the images (example MySpace), and more often than not, the origin ends up with a definitive identity. The response report on the author, for instance, clearly identifies her

fortran77 7y ago

I like the way they claim it stops "child molesters" but then goes on to say that Macy's uses it, presumably to identify shoplifters before they strike.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> “Clearview helps to identify child molesters, murderers, suspected terrorists, and other dangerous people quickly, accurately, and reliably to keep our families and communities safe.” It helps to identify child molesters. "Think of the children".

kurthr 7y ago

It's worth noting (as mentioned they are under security review) that apparently ClearviewAI lost their client database (hopefully that's all) to hackers last week. Along with being sued by the big boys, that's gotta hurt. https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/clearview-ai-loses-entire-database-of-faceprint-buying-clients-to-hackers/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/28/clearview-ai-los...

finnh 7y ago

Is it just me or are those results clearly based on using her name (from the ID she provided as part of her CCPA request)? To have zero false positives, and multiple different hair colors, etc ... strains credulity that is all based on face matching only.

ThePhysicist 7y ago

Supposedly any company in the EU that has data on you needs to proactively make you aware of this and allow you to have this data erased or rectified. I don’t think all or even most companies respect this rule yet (I haven’t heard of a single company about my data so far) but I think it’s a powerful idea that would keep companies like Clearview from being able to build up such large databases without people knowing about it. I really hope the EU will keep strengthening subject rights as I think it’s a very good solution to most problems involving the use of personal data.