18 ms·

I got my file from Clearview AI

811 points by us0r 7y ago

hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
Is it really that surprising, since all the photos are available on public sites? It seems this tool reveals the same a Google search for the name would reveal.
- MikeAmelung 7y ago
  This guy's name is Tom Smith. Go ahead and pop that into Google and let me know how that turns out. His name is about as generic as you could imagine for a white person. But they returned a bunch of images of HIM, and one Alexey Something-or-other, which could be his troll account. Edit: the Alexey part is a joke, I'm sorry but I thought it was funny.
  - dmix 7y ago
    TIL generic names (in your geographic region) are good ways to promote privacy. I always wondered how the Chinese authorities figured that out considering the massive name reuse in China. I can’t watch a Chinese movie or TV show without at least one character sharing the surname (the first part in China) of a Chinese person I know. Smith would be our classic version in the west.
    - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
      The Romani people have used it as a general tool to make it difficult to govern them. The local equivalent of "John Smith" gets used by everybody in every official form. Meanwhile, they just call each other what they otherwise would've.
    - gowld 7y ago
      China handles it by making you put your national id # or phone # on everything you do.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  The only real concern I see is that it allows someone searching to go from photo to name very quickly.
samsquire 7y ago
Ideally we live in a society where not being anonymous is not such a big risk. But governments change, the data is still around to be abused. This is what disturbs me. Is how data can be abused in the future.
- chii 7y ago
  > not being anonymous is not such a big risk. the world has always been anonymous because of the lack of capability to track large amounts of data - until recently. Anonymity allows you safety from any one who seeks to predate you. I think that safety needs to be maintained. People stupidly put photos of themselves online, then face tag their friends. This allows third parties to identify your friends and circles, and that's dangerous. All relationship should be reciprocal.
  - kbenson 7y ago
    No, long ago the world was a bunch of small groups of people that knew each other intimately. At the village and tribe level there was little or no anonymity. The offset was that there was also intimacy. The problem now is that we again have no anonymity, but there is none of the intimacy needed to offset the negative aspects of this (and we probably can't, I don't think intimacy scales the same way, but who knows).
    - wolco 7y ago
      I thought about this. Perhaps youtube real videos (not staged mini tv shows like peewee) has opened up people's lives to their world. Perhaps twitch/live coding streaming provide this on some level. Perhaps onlind video games or even social media provide that intimacy into others lives at scale.
    - vageli 7y ago
      The people who left their tribes (or were forced off) were effectively anonymous to any new group of people they might come across. So if you were kicked from your group for a misdeed, sure you could continue your bad deeds in the new group or you could turn over a new leaf without the weight of your past mistakes holding you back.
koolba 7y ago
This website does some crazy redirect loop between medium at the sub domain when opened without JS. How is that even possible?
- ev1 7y ago
  Server side redirect after tracking cookies aren't set by JS. Advertising.com blogs (AOL?) do the same thing.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It didn't for me. (It did, however, make the content of the page load roughly two orders of magnitude faster.)
- arkadiyt 7y ago
  Also running into this issue.
- ehnto 7y ago
  Potentially done with an http-equiv meta tag hidden inside a noscript tag < meta http-equiv=refresh content=0; url=http://example.com/ >
- nieve 7y ago
  Nothing magic, they're just sending a HTTP 302 redirect if they don't see a cookie. If you hit it with wget you'll see two 302s, one of them with the old "Moved Temporarily" text and the other with "Found". I'm not sure why you only get two with wget, possibly user-agent sniffing. Tracing with firefox's dev tools I see an initial JS redirect, but that may be a bug since I've got javascript disabled for medium. Alternatively it's a bug in NoScript and that's not good. Either way they'll toss a 302 with no js at all.
- shakna 7y ago
  It returns a 302 header with this location: https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fonezero.medium.com%2Fi-got-my-file-from-clearview-ai-and-it-freaked-me-out-33ca28b5d6d4 https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https%3A%2F... Which then sends another location of: https://onezero.medium.com/i-got-my-file-from-clearview-ai-and-it-freaked-me-out-33ca28b5d6d4 https://onezero.medium.com/i-got-my-file-from-clearview-ai-a... Which just ends up bouncing you back and forth, unless JS is allowed to percolate through. However, there is some useragent sniffing happening, so the exact set of headers changes.
40four 7y ago
I used to think some of my peers were being overly cautious by purposely trying to obfuscate their online profile. Back in the day, I couldn’t care less about putting in effort to try to protect my online privacy. I have slowly but surely come to see the light. Now it’s at the forefront of my mind at all times. Learning about this company (and I imagine other unknown entities are doing the same) has encouraged me to get more aggressive. I think I will start to try some shenanigans I learned from a friend. I plan on replacing my online profile pics to a random grab from https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/. Might not make much of a difference for the old stuff, maybe I can successfully request a data deletion as the article suggests. At least it will introduce a little bit of noise to the AI overloads :)
- wideasleep1 7y ago
  Starting in the early 90's, 'everyone's a dog on the internet', so my profile pics were dogs. One buzzed evening, I changed a few to Fabio. Good luck, Fabio,
  - jlgaddis 7y ago
    "I miss the good ole days of the Internet -- back when the men were men, the women were men, and the kids were FBI agents."
- david-cako 7y ago
  I too am extremely opposed to any and all non-consenting invasions of digital privacy (i.e., the problem isn’t the known-known of what you upload, but the hidden implications of it), but on the contrary, I make a disciplined effort to make my digital fingerprint reflect my actual views and identity. Whatever time capsule my digital identity ends up in, I want to be as accurate and beautiful as possible. This includes my avid support of corporations which make good faith efforts to defend natural rights and freedoms, and my vehement opposition to corporate/political nonsense that does not represent, in good faith, the interests of humanity and nature. “A reasonable amount” of surveillance is an essential aspect of society, but it SHOULD be considered invasive, and should never be invisible. I suspect that there will be BS metrics to evaluate how “consenting” a given individual is to NSA/Clearview type behavior, and I would hope that I am casting a shield of protection. I feel bad about the fact that an element of bitterness is necessary to be resilient. I know no other way than truth. I truly act as if AI is learning from me, and believe that there are long reaching and metaphysical effects to all actions.
sxp 7y ago
The article is missing a link to the Clearview forms to request a copy of the data or request deletion: https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests
- _fullpint 7y ago
  Its absolutely wild that for anyone that's not a resident of California or EU/UK -- there isn't a way for you to request anything other than specific images/links.
  - ardy42 7y ago
    > there isn't a way for you to request anything other than specific images/links. And you can't even do that unless you've already managed to remove the image from the internet: https://clearview.ai/privacy/deindex https://clearview.ai/privacy/deindex: > This tool will not remove URLs from Clearview which are currently active and public. If there is a public image or web page that you want excluded, then take it down yourself (or ask the webmaster or publisher to take it down). After it is down, submit the link here.
    - sdoering 7y ago
      At least for GDPR reasons (as far as I understand it) you can forbid the use of your data. They then are not allowed to use your data in any way. Even data already public or put on the internet by you in the future. If they do they are in "deep shit" (pardon my french) legally. I actually hope they do this - and somebody can catch them in the act. I believe they will be gone soon then. Also I would advise anyone under GDPR legislation to also request exactly with whom the data was shared and go on to also request deletion and usage information from them. It is a pain that one has to jump all these hoops. I would love for the GDPR to have a way of forcing such a company to also do the information and deletion requests on your behalf and prove that to you. Sadly this was not included I believe.
  - speedgoose 7y ago
    Norway also has GDPR.
jachee 7y ago
I wonder what would happen if I were to issue them a $5000/mo/piece retroactive license invoice for any/all use of my name/likeness/etc for their profit. I wonder what would happen if everyone did.
- hedora 7y ago
  I’d love to see a successful copyright case along these lines. I wonder if this can be combined with adding a “terms of service” to your FB profile. Corporations have perverted contract law to the point where their terms of service are binding even if you never read them, or are even aware of them. Turnabout is fair play, right?
  - DominikPeters 7y ago
    In OP’s case, his profile includes pictures scraped from a privately hosted blog, where adding such terms would be a simple matter.
    - spockz 7y ago
      Wouldn’t the new terms and conditions only apply to the pictures after the TnC have been added? So any already scraped picture could still be used.
    - sneak 7y ago
      CFAA enforcement is only for large corporations. Try to get an AUSA to enforce CFAA violations against a big company as an individual person with a website and they will probably laugh in your face. Remember: there are two sets of laws in the US: ones that apply to you, and another set for large corporations that cooperate with the police and military.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  A class-action suit that would probably last for a couple years and end in a settlement where the claimants - assuming they fill(ed) in forms x, y and z, would be entitled to at best a few hundred dollars. See also the Equifax settlement. I'd say Equifax is the best / most recent example about something like this.
thinkloop 7y ago
Bit of a rub that to request your messy, potentially erroneous, public profile, you have to give private, authenticated identification and contact information - basically the most valuable information they could want, dramatically increasing the value of your profile that you were so concerned about in the first place.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Bit of a rub that to request your messy, potentially erroneous, public profile, you have to give private, authenticated identification and contact information - basically the most valuable information they could want, dramatically increasing the value of your profile that you were so concerned about in the first place. The concept of being opted-in by default and being forced to authenticate yourself to opt out is getting more and more ridiculous by the day. These systems need to be opt-in, and that requirement needs to be enforced by some kind of powerful government agency with the power to arrest and jail non-compliant operators. Anything less feels like it would end up being a complete surrender to companies like Clearview AI.
  - bostik 7y ago
    I've been thinking about this for a while. A fairly simple solution would be to turn the incentives around. In the EU, people are already the rightful owners of their data, so that needs to be applied world wide. But that's not enough. To really flip the table, we need to make it mandatory to pay people for use of their data. If a company is exploiting[ß] someone else's property, the owner must be compensated for the privilege. Take a page from SaaS companies' nickel-and-diming ("pay per use") billing strategy, too. Just turn it around: forbid blanket permissions and consents. The idea is to ensure that other people's data needs to be universally treated as a toxic liability, not an asset. ß: in economic sense, although other meanings apply equally well.
  - tomerv 7y ago
    The governments are the customers of such products. We can't expect them to protect us.
megaman821 7y ago
When it comes to information gathering, I have always assumed if it is technically possible to do, then some agency in the government is doing it. So even if people were able to shame all of Clearview's customers into not using them, that wouldn't stop this type of information gathering form going on.
- kick 7y ago
  Just because the government has nukes, doesn't mean citizens should have them. The government shouldn't have them, either, but there's not much citizens can do about that outside of revolt. Meanwhile this company has been nothing but privacy abuses and lies to the public. If it isn't broken up by law, it will be interesting to see what the people do.
wolco 7y ago
Is it me or did anyone find the availability of photos to be less than I would have expected. It is worrisome but a facebook could produce a lot more privacy related connections from private photos no one knows existed. I guess I was expecting that.. perhaps in the future facebook will offer this service.
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Almost all of those photos were from the guys personal blog and one wasn't even him. I'd be way more worried if it was finding stuff like me in the background of someone else's photo in a crowded city or something like that.
  - wideasleep1 7y ago
    To my knowledge, only 1 photo of me exists online (I've never even taken a selfie), in a concert crowd that showed up in our online newspaper. Feeling pretty secure about that.
fg6hr 7y ago
It's interesting how collecting or distributing files with music is a grave crime and corporations can take down anything they don't like with a half-assed DMCA request, with no repercussions for "mistakes", but a person's face image doesn't belong to that person and the same corporations can safely collect and distribute these images for profit.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  It goes even further than corporations being able to request things from being taken down. Kim Dotcom's house was raided by the FBI in New Zealand over this. He isn't even an American!
  - chance_state 7y ago
    >Kim Dotcom's house was raided by the FBI [...] Source? The US asked for his extradition and the NZ authorities raided his home, as far as I know.
    - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      raided at the request of the FBI (which was at the request of the MPAA) might be more accurate.
- ArnoVW 7y ago
  Actually, in Europe it is illegal to collect personally identifiable information of people without their consent. GDPR and all that. I am surprised they haven't been fined out of existence yet.
  - sdoering 7y ago
    Probably because nobody in the EU currently has this company on their screens. Or because those who are critical of this company and its practices have not yet reported it to the relevant authorities. In Germany not only the GDPR regulation but also the so-called "right to the own picture" applies here.This means that no one may use/sell pictures of a person without explicit consent. Therefore, photographers must also have an explicit release of the person for the respective context of use.
battery_cowboy 7y ago
Private companies can do whatever immoral garbage they want, and in exchange for access to the data or the product they developed in an unethical manner, the government slaps them on the wrist, or does nothing, allowing it to get worse and worse and allowing them to assert more control over us. Imagine the story when people find out this or another company started skimming the porn sites with facial recognition, starts gaining access to surveillance footage from Nest or Ring, or maybe even gets access to state and federal DOT cameras and real time feeds from body cameras! Facial recognition is going to need some regulation, ASAP.
- nexuist 7y ago
  > starts gaining access to surveillance footage from Nest or Ring, or maybe even gets access to state and federal DOT cameras and real time feeds from body cameras! https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-04-banjo-ai-utah-law-enforcement-surveillance.html https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-04-banjo-ai-utah-law-enforc... > The agreement gives the company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and public safety cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles and more. In exchange, Banjo promises to alert law enforcement to "anomalies," aka crimes, but the arrangement raises all kinds of red flags. > Banjo relies on info scraped from social media, satellite imaging data and the real-time info from law enforcement. Banjo claims its "Live Time Intelligence" AI can identify crimes -- everything from kidnappings to shootings and "opioid events" -- as they happen.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shmerl 7y ago
They should be in prison, instead of making money on violating people's privacy.
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Excerpt: "What does a Clearview profile contain? Up until recently, it would have been almost impossible to find out. Companies like Clearview were not required to share their data, and could easily build massive databases of personal information in secret. Thanks to two landmark pieces of legislation, though, that is changing. In 2018, the European Union began enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And on January 1, 2020, an equivalent piece of legislation, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), went into effect in my home state. Both GDPR and CCPA give consumers unprecedented access to the personal data that companies like Clearview gather about them. If a consumer submits a valid request, companies are required to provide their data to them. The penalties for noncompliance stretch into the tens of millions of dollars. Several other U.S. states are considering similar legislation, and a federal privacy law is expected in the next five years."
DeathArrow 7y ago
They are using copyrighted images. What if 1000 of copyright owners decide to sue them asking $100 000 each?
- Kovah 7y ago
  One thing you should be very careful about is licensing. If you post photos on Facebook or Instagram, you automatically grant them a license to redistribute the photo and share it with others. And these "others" can include Clearview. So, Clearview could have a contract with Facebook which legally allows them to get and save those photos. So, you are still the copyright owner, but due to licensing Clearview can legally store and use the photos. About suing them if they would break copyrights: not sure about the US, but in Germany it wouldn't be that easy to actually sue them for such a high sum. You could argue that the company makes money by offering the search service, but there must be evidence that Clearview made that specific sum just with your photo(s), which is very unlikely.
  - sdoering 7y ago
    At least if it is a photo in a news story or from a private homepage I would believe they are in trouble. I doubt they have licensing agreements from every news source. And I am sure they do not have them for private homepages.
  - Cthulhu_ 7y ago
    They would have to be able to prove that in a lawsuit first. Do they have similar agreements with the alumini magazine? The python coder's meetup group? The personal blog? Just one of those pictures would be enough for a lawsuit. Of course, if someone were to sue, they would be heavily pushed to settle out of court. I suspect there's a lot more legal activity going on about things like this, but everyone that starts to make some noise is quickly silenced with a lump sum and a binding contract to shut up about it. If they don't, they're threatened with spending the next 5-10 years in court. Because if there's anything corporate lawyers are good at, it's stalling and making sure the suing party, especially if it's a random consumer, spends years and hundreds of thousands in court fees. What we need is more rich people suing businesses. Or a massive public defense fund supporting the average joe's case. But right now it's in the rich people's interests to support shady businesses, and if they don't they'll be offered massive financial incentives on the golf course.
MUHAMMADRIZWAN 7y ago
https://t.co/MirDgOtUWY?amp=1 https://t.co/MirDgOtUWY?amp=1
bencollier49 7y ago
Compiling profiles like this without consent is subject to massive fines under GDPR. I find it extremely surprising that they would be responding to GDPR subject access requests, given that they appear to be ignoring the rest of it.
- sdoering 7y ago
  Not replying would get them in trouble even faster. So probably they hope to appease the one requesting the data.
holler 7y ago
Do the founders of this company have their profiles in the database? What about the other executives and investors? Do those profiles contain all of the same personally identifiable information as any other randomly sampled user? Does it show photos, social media posts, personal contacts, school teachers, addresses, family member data etc? If not, this sort of blunt assault on privacy would make Orwell toss in the grave.
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martin-adams 7y ago
So will we see a new normal that if you delete your data, you’re considered suspicious as it looks like you might be hiding something. Personal data may soon become the same as a credit score. No data, high risk.
- fredsanford 7y ago
  This is already here with Google if you use oBlock or uMatrix. Endless Captchas... "We detected suspicious blah blah blah"
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    My Recatcha policy: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102054627041751386 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102054627041751386
    - ThreeFx 7y ago
      Ironically that triggered the CloudFlare check for me.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        A recent change on that instance, and one causing other issues: https://mastodon.cloud/@TheAdmin/103880990266428449 https://mastodon.cloud/@TheAdmin/103880990266428449 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103882090290877356 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103882090290877356
knolax 7y ago
Wow that last photo doesn't even remotely look like him. I'm more surprised by how bad their facial recognition is than by the data have.
cmarschner 7y ago
Given the „right to be forgotten“ shouldn‘t he be able to request all his data be deleted?
- erk__ 7y ago
  From the article: > And remember that once you receive your data, you have the option to demand that Clearview delete it or amend it if you’d like them to do so.
LockAndLol 7y ago
I'm not entirely sure what's so shocking about public data, shared willingly by the person to the public, being used to identify the person. If the data weren't/hadn't been shared willingly, I'd definitely see that as a problem. Same thing as if the data were to have been gleaned from non-public sources e.g the person's private belongings or secured digital realms like private forums, password encrypted backups, private profiles, etc.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  It's about trust and permission. If I give e.g. a local news website permission to use my portrait, I do NOT implicitly give permission to Clearview, Google, Facebook, etc to use it for their own purposes. I mean it's implicitly known that anything you post on the internet is public property, but legally that is not the case. Portrait law (at least in my country). You can't just take someone's portrait and use it for your own gains.
  - meowface 7y ago
    Are they actually using it, though? Or are they just a search engine presenting public links that are hosting the photos of your face? Is linking to something covered by GDPR? Couldn't this same argument be made for Google reverse image search? Reverse image search someone's face and you're likely to get links to places that photo is located; potentially including links to different photos of their face, as well. They're likely mirroring local copies of the photos as well when they show you the link (in case a link later 404s or changes), but so is Google reverse image search, I believe. If your position is that both things are wrong, that's fine, but would Google then basically have to remove the entire feature? Or prevent searches for any photo containing any faces?
  - LunaSea 7y ago
    Actually you do, because scraping is considered legal in the US and your information is on a public site which makes scraping the information legal.
    - 7y ago
Rafuino 7y ago
I submitted an info request about 2 months ago now, and I haven't heard a word from these jackasses
- fishmaster 7y ago
  Keep going. They risk being fined by not answering.
barnyfried 7y ago
social network victims
sergioisidoro 7y ago
Why are paywalled articles still allowed on HN front page? And why are people still upvoting them?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Because some of us agree that not everything is free beer and people that provide information also have bills to pay.
- stagas 7y ago
  Same frustration here, but this[0] did the job for me. [0]: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- tomhoward 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693084
himinlomax 7y ago
The author says: "If they have — and you’re a resident of California or a citizen of the EU — the company is legally obligated to give you your profile, too." Sure, they're obligated to give you your profile per GDPR. But if you're within the GDPR's jurisdiction, they're obligated to get your consent BEFORE they collect personal information about you. If they haven't, they're liable for at least millions of euros of fines.
yoaviram 7y ago
Send them a GDPR/CCPA deletion request now: https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai
chippy 7y ago
Would you help and use Clearview if it was being used in your governments strategy against coronavirus? Would you volunteer your time to tag images with your friends and acquaintances, to help slow down the virus? To do otherwise would be immoral and lead to the death of thousands, right? To those worried about that, it's just temporary. It would just last a few months and then you don't need to worry about it any more. This is a global war and we have to make sacrifices and take important actions.
- toxicFork 7y ago
  "It would just last a few months and then you don't need to worry about it any more." I heard about this before...
- newswasboring 7y ago
  Yes I will. But only if assurances are made that all this work will be destroyed after the pandemic is over. I give my consent for one task and after that task is over that data should not be used. Its the same case as people being allowed to kill in war but not after. Although weapons are kept after wars strict measures are in place to stop them from reaching unauthorized hands. These measures are not perfect but they are really good and in good faith should be continuously improved.
- dabbledash 7y ago
  No. This isn’t even a hard question.
  - chippy 7y ago
    What if everyone around you told you that by not using it you were contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands? Edits - and what if your friends and family tag you and add your details instead? That way you dont need to actively support it.
    - dabbledash 7y ago
      Isn’t this part of the original question? No. The justification for mass surveillance and totalitarianism is always “it will make us safer in the short term.” No one who knows me will be surprised to find out that I think it creates larger long term dangers or that safety isn’t my highest value in any case. Response to the edit: I don’t know how I would react, because they didn’t have malicious intent, but they still wronged me. I would be angry with them, and it would definitely have a negative effect on our relationships. I wouldn’t look down on anyone who wanted to tag their own photos. And I would be willing to do geo tracking with something that I believed was actually temporary. Give me a dongle I can throw away when this is all over and I’ll carry it around.
shmageggy 7y ago
> For a few million dollars, nearly anyone with a startup background could likely build their own version of Clearview in less than a year. Am I being naive, or is this being overly generous? What about this can not be recreated with an off-the-shelf web scraper and a pretrained facial recognizer?
- irjustin 7y ago
  Maybe over generous, may be not. We shouldn't get stuck on the accuracy of the dollar amount. The point the author is trying to make is that there will always be "ClearView". So, we need strong legislation around the use of this technology especially when it comes to law enforcement as opposed to trying to kill the idea itself because that's unrealistic. Just as you said, you could start it from your laptop.
- sullyj3 7y ago
  Probably the scale.
- sdan 7y ago
  You can even upload the scraped images onto google photos (does a boatload of ai classification) Pretty much anyone with python familiarity can do this.
- manmal 7y ago
  I think Clearview having indexed basically all public information about people gives them a serious advantage for face recognition and building up a network of relationships between people.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  It's likely to cost you a few million dollars in hardware and multiple months to run your an off-the-shelf web scraper and a pretrained facial recognizer on a very, very large number of images. There are a lot of images on the internet, bandwidth and compute are not free.
arjunkumar12345 7y ago
My hide 4fune app
arjunkumar12345 7y ago
My haid
101404 7y ago
Why is there no arrest warrant against the managers and owners of Clearview here on the EU? They are using PII of hundreds of millions of Europeans without written consent. That alone should mean billions of euros in fines.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  There is no arrest warrant for Google, Facebook or ad network employees either despite them violating the GDPR on a daily basis and very large scale. Granted, the GDPR doesn't say anything about arresting offenders, but the companies should at least be investigated and fined, which isn't happening either. The GDPR is a joke.
  - new_here 7y ago
    https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
    - TrickyRick 7y ago
      This exactly, it's very much happening even if you're not reading it in the news every time.
      - a_imho 7y ago
        If you search for Google, you will find one 50M fine. What is the 4% of Google revenue's again? 50M is filed under cost of doing business or the corruption budget if you are not that generous.
        raverbashing 7y ago
        So you mean the small companies won't get fines of 10Mi dollars as everyone is so quick to claim here?
        a_imho 7y ago
hellofunk 7y ago
> Perhaps most worrying is the fact that some of Clearview’s data is wrong. The last hit on my profile is a link to a Facebook page for an entirely different person. If an investigator searched my face and followed that lead (perhaps suspecting that the person was actually my alias), it’s possible I could be accused of a crime that the unknown, unrelated person whose profile turned up in my report actually did commit. Yikes, this is like Minority Report - level weirdness.
eurekin 7y ago
Honest question - why is author so shocked, given that all the information was public or published by himself?
- lolc 7y ago
  Humans don't keep track of all things that could be done. I know how what Clearview does is technically possible, but when I see it being done, it shocks me too.
- endorphone 7y ago
  Probably because it was in disparate places and it seemed unlikely that someone would, or even could, aggregate and correlate it all with enough accuracy to not be junk. There is a difference, or at least there conceptually was, between posting your life story and all of your thoughts on your central LinkedIn profile, versus having two dozen different "blogs" of sorts over the years, Steam accounts, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, usenet groups that come and go and we think of as ethereal. When you see all of that stuff pulled together it could be deeply unsettling. Of course that was foolish -- eventually networking, storage, and computation would allow for everything to be ingested, and facial identification would greatly assist in pulling it together -- but it seemed dystopian at the time.
- Lio 7y ago
  I think because the idea that someone you don't know and have no relationship with is systematically collating everything they can about you, is a bit like having a stalker. You don't know why they're stalking you. On the face of it it's for law enforcement in case you decide to commit a crime sometime in the future. ...or it could be so that they can raise the prices in shops when you walking and the facial recognition picks you up. ...or it could be for a future employer to decide that the kind of bars you visit means that you're not the right "social fit" for a job. ...or it could be for... anything. You have no control and that's the scary thing.
MUHAMMADRIZWAN 7y ago
http://raboninco.com/1yo5 http://raboninco.com/1yo5
davnn 7y ago
So the difference between this an google‘s reverse image search is that google‘s matching algorithm is worse (probably because it doesn‘t include facial recognition)? Well, public images are public and I don‘t think banning such a service would prevent governments from implementing something like this .. the technological challenges are getting less and less.
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  You can presumably hold government officials accountable, but you can’t vote out the CEO of Clearview.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mbrameld 7y ago
Aren't they profiting from the copyrighted works of others without express permission?
minusSeven 7y ago
For people in countries with no clear privacy laws could I also request Clearview to show my data ? Has anyone tried it ?
Funes- 7y ago
Nobody should be posting their private data (pictures or videos, for instance) on a publicly accessible site if they want privacy. Look, if you want your relatives, friends, and even acquaintances to see whatever you want them to, just do it through a medium that allows for private communication. It's just common sense.
- vharuck 7y ago
  >It's just common sense. Based on what and how people share online, the "common" sense is an expectation of decency in not vacuuming data just because you can. You and I know that's silly, but that's not common sense.
DyslexicAtheist 7y ago
I hope somebody out there in a country that doesn't have an extradition agreement with the US breaks into their systems and publishes the list of their clients. We urgently need a big-style leak of everything these scumbags do. Also countries should start issuing arrest warrants and sanctions against them.
air7 7y ago
The thorny issue here is that this is all public information put forth willingly by people. These are not leaked medical records. In a way these abilities are like a person saying "hmm isn't that the guy from that thing a while back?" What are the limits of what is allowed to do with public data? I don't have a clear opinion.
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  The data was shared willingly within the understanding of the person making that decision. Do people really understand how much data in their day to day life they have “willingly” shared?
- Talyen42 7y ago
  I think about it like this: what would happen if you did this manually, at the same scale? If I went around asking every single person you've ever met if they could provide any pictures in which you're in the background, and collected them all and sold them as a collection, i'd be borderline harassing/stalking you. Not necessarily straight up illegal, but maybe in some ways? That's what this is, digitally.
- njkleiner 7y ago
  > These are not leaked medical records. In a way these abilities are like a person saying "hmm isn't that the guy from that thing a while back?" That's why I don't think there is much of a point in trying to prevent people (e.g. by law) from crawling and using data in this fashion. I feel like the only reasonable solution here would be to force these companies to rebuild their databases by legally limiting the lifetime of such data. That way people have a chance to remove themselves from the database by changing/deleting their online profiles without having to use legal measures like GDPR requests. People wouldn't even have to be aware of any individual database they might be part of; they would be removed from it automatically at some point. Another benefit of this would be that the pure cost of constantly re-crawling a giant dataset could act as a limiting factor and therefore prevent abuse.
  - gowld 7y ago
drivebycomment 7y ago
A related thought experiment. What if Google or Bing build an image search service based on the face recognition ? If you don't like that idea, how about doing that for celebrities and public figures? If you are ok with one but not the other, what would be a good line distinguishing them and guiding principle? If you are not ok with either or ok with both, why? More I think about it, more I lean toward allowing both, but I can see why people would not like it.
- brandonmenc 7y ago
  > If you are ok with one but not the other, what would be a good line distinguishing them and guiding principle? Because celebrity by definition requires trading privacy for fame, and is almost always a decision. We need a new legal classification for "public, but not accessible by everyone in the world for the rest of time" information, which is what most regular people assume or desire for themselves.
joshwa 7y ago
Yandex Image Search already uses facial recognition and is available to the public. See: https://yandex.com/images https://yandex.com/images https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/facial-recognition-for-the-public-yandex/ https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/facial-recogniti... https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using-reverse-image-search-for-investigations/ https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...
Ymiilie00 7y ago
Just incase you are in need of hire a hacker services, These are the possible takes to take . 1- Never hire a hacker with Gmail domain as they are always traceable 2- Hackers for life services are mostly legit when you go on DEEP WEB mostly on HL forums 3- you can either hire a hacker for phone hack, social media hack, website hacker, credit score boost , school grade change, etc. During my research of hiring a hacker on deep web , I was able to gather facts that most hackers do not disclose their information online Hence they use cryptocurrencies 4- Never pay any hacker with your personal information because they can turn against you afterwards . 5- On that forum I also made research on few hackers and I found out that most time BARRYSANCHEZ at HACKERMAIL dot COM AND YT.C at MYSELF doT COM were mostly the hackers people use because they had most of the positive reviews on there . I have tried to use their services twice , the first one was for a website hack and the second was a social media hack ( which was not successful but I was refunded for that ) . 6- It is always best to make your own research before hiring a hacker so you will know exactly what to do . Good luck .
Jennajeanette00 7y ago
If you need a hacker for hire service, I think one of the best places to find one will be on the deep web HL forum . where you can find tins of hackers willing to hack anything for money . One of those with 89% positive review will be Barrysanchez AT hackermail DOtcom . I am a proud user of their services. and I am not ashamed to say this . lol

811 points by us0r 7y ago

Is it really that surprising, since all the photos are available on public sites? It seems this tool reveals the same a Google search for the name would reveal.

MikeAmelung 7y ago
This guy's name is Tom Smith. Go ahead and pop that into Google and let me know how that turns out. His name is about as generic as you could imagine for a white person. But they returned a bunch of images of HIM, and one Alexey Something-or-other, which could be his troll account. Edit: the Alexey part is a joke, I'm sorry but I thought it was funny.
- dmix 7y ago
  TIL generic names (in your geographic region) are good ways to promote privacy. I always wondered how the Chinese authorities figured that out considering the massive name reuse in China. I can’t watch a Chinese movie or TV show without at least one character sharing the surname (the first part in China) of a Chinese person I know. Smith would be our classic version in the west.
  - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
    The Romani people have used it as a general tool to make it difficult to govern them. The local equivalent of "John Smith" gets used by everybody in every official form. Meanwhile, they just call each other what they otherwise would've.
  - gowld 7y ago
    China handles it by making you put your national id # or phone # on everything you do.
RandallBrown 7y ago
The only real concern I see is that it allows someone searching to go from photo to name very quickly.

samsquire 7y ago

Ideally we live in a society where not being anonymous is not such a big risk. But governments change, the data is still around to be abused. This is what disturbs me. Is how data can be abused in the future.

chii 7y ago
> not being anonymous is not such a big risk. the world has always been anonymous because of the lack of capability to track large amounts of data - until recently. Anonymity allows you safety from any one who seeks to predate you. I think that safety needs to be maintained. People stupidly put photos of themselves online, then face tag their friends. This allows third parties to identify your friends and circles, and that's dangerous. All relationship should be reciprocal.
- kbenson 7y ago
  No, long ago the world was a bunch of small groups of people that knew each other intimately. At the village and tribe level there was little or no anonymity. The offset was that there was also intimacy. The problem now is that we again have no anonymity, but there is none of the intimacy needed to offset the negative aspects of this (and we probably can't, I don't think intimacy scales the same way, but who knows).
  - wolco 7y ago
    I thought about this. Perhaps youtube real videos (not staged mini tv shows like peewee) has opened up people's lives to their world. Perhaps twitch/live coding streaming provide this on some level. Perhaps onlind video games or even social media provide that intimacy into others lives at scale.
  - vageli 7y ago
    The people who left their tribes (or were forced off) were effectively anonymous to any new group of people they might come across. So if you were kicked from your group for a misdeed, sure you could continue your bad deeds in the new group or you could turn over a new leaf without the weight of your past mistakes holding you back.

koolba 7y ago

This website does some crazy redirect loop between medium at the sub domain when opened without JS. How is that even possible?

ev1 7y ago
Server side redirect after tracking cookies aren't set by JS. Advertising.com blogs (AOL?) do the same thing.
saagarjha 7y ago
It didn't for me. (It did, however, make the content of the page load roughly two orders of magnitude faster.)
arkadiyt 7y ago
Also running into this issue.
ehnto 7y ago
Potentially done with an http-equiv meta tag hidden inside a noscript tag < meta http-equiv=refresh content=0; url=http://example.com/ >
nieve 7y ago
Nothing magic, they're just sending a HTTP 302 redirect if they don't see a cookie. If you hit it with wget you'll see two 302s, one of them with the old "Moved Temporarily" text and the other with "Found". I'm not sure why you only get two with wget, possibly user-agent sniffing. Tracing with firefox's dev tools I see an initial JS redirect, but that may be a bug since I've got javascript disabled for medium. Alternatively it's a bug in NoScript and that's not good. Either way they'll toss a 302 with no js at all.
shakna 7y ago
It returns a 302 header with this location: https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fonezero.medium.com%2Fi-got-my-file-from-clearview-ai-and-it-freaked-me-out-33ca28b5d6d4 https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https%3A%2F... Which then sends another location of: https://onezero.medium.com/i-got-my-file-from-clearview-ai-and-it-freaked-me-out-33ca28b5d6d4 https://onezero.medium.com/i-got-my-file-from-clearview-ai-a... Which just ends up bouncing you back and forth, unless JS is allowed to percolate through. However, there is some useragent sniffing happening, so the exact set of headers changes.

40four 7y ago

I used to think some of my peers were being overly cautious by purposely trying to obfuscate their online profile. Back in the day, I couldn’t care less about putting in effort to try to protect my online privacy. I have slowly but surely come to see the light. Now it’s at the forefront of my mind at all times. Learning about this company (and I imagine other unknown entities are doing the same) has encouraged me to get more aggressive. I think I will start to try some shenanigans I learned from a friend. I plan on replacing my online profile pics to a random grab from https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/. Might not make much of a difference for the old stuff, maybe I can successfully request a data deletion as the article suggests. At least it will introduce a little bit of noise to the AI overloads :)

wideasleep1 7y ago
Starting in the early 90's, 'everyone's a dog on the internet', so my profile pics were dogs. One buzzed evening, I changed a few to Fabio. Good luck, Fabio,
- jlgaddis 7y ago
  "I miss the good ole days of the Internet -- back when the men were men, the women were men, and the kids were FBI agents."
david-cako 7y ago
I too am extremely opposed to any and all non-consenting invasions of digital privacy (i.e., the problem isn’t the known-known of what you upload, but the hidden implications of it), but on the contrary, I make a disciplined effort to make my digital fingerprint reflect my actual views and identity. Whatever time capsule my digital identity ends up in, I want to be as accurate and beautiful as possible. This includes my avid support of corporations which make good faith efforts to defend natural rights and freedoms, and my vehement opposition to corporate/political nonsense that does not represent, in good faith, the interests of humanity and nature. “A reasonable amount” of surveillance is an essential aspect of society, but it SHOULD be considered invasive, and should never be invisible. I suspect that there will be BS metrics to evaluate how “consenting” a given individual is to NSA/Clearview type behavior, and I would hope that I am casting a shield of protection. I feel bad about the fact that an element of bitterness is necessary to be resilient. I know no other way than truth. I truly act as if AI is learning from me, and believe that there are long reaching and metaphysical effects to all actions.

sxp 7y ago

The article is missing a link to the Clearview forms to request a copy of the data or request deletion: https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests

_fullpint 7y ago
Its absolutely wild that for anyone that's not a resident of California or EU/UK -- there isn't a way for you to request anything other than specific images/links.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > there isn't a way for you to request anything other than specific images/links. And you can't even do that unless you've already managed to remove the image from the internet: https://clearview.ai/privacy/deindex https://clearview.ai/privacy/deindex: > This tool will not remove URLs from Clearview which are currently active and public. If there is a public image or web page that you want excluded, then take it down yourself (or ask the webmaster or publisher to take it down). After it is down, submit the link here.
  - sdoering 7y ago
    At least for GDPR reasons (as far as I understand it) you can forbid the use of your data. They then are not allowed to use your data in any way. Even data already public or put on the internet by you in the future. If they do they are in "deep shit" (pardon my french) legally. I actually hope they do this - and somebody can catch them in the act. I believe they will be gone soon then. Also I would advise anyone under GDPR legislation to also request exactly with whom the data was shared and go on to also request deletion and usage information from them. It is a pain that one has to jump all these hoops. I would love for the GDPR to have a way of forcing such a company to also do the information and deletion requests on your behalf and prove that to you. Sadly this was not included I believe.
- speedgoose 7y ago
  Norway also has GDPR.

jachee 7y ago

I wonder what would happen if I were to issue them a $5000/mo/piece retroactive license invoice for any/all use of my name/likeness/etc for their profit. I wonder what would happen if everyone did.

hedora 7y ago
I’d love to see a successful copyright case along these lines. I wonder if this can be combined with adding a “terms of service” to your FB profile. Corporations have perverted contract law to the point where their terms of service are binding even if you never read them, or are even aware of them. Turnabout is fair play, right?
- DominikPeters 7y ago
  In OP’s case, his profile includes pictures scraped from a privately hosted blog, where adding such terms would be a simple matter.
  - spockz 7y ago
    Wouldn’t the new terms and conditions only apply to the pictures after the TnC have been added? So any already scraped picture could still be used.
  - sneak 7y ago
    CFAA enforcement is only for large corporations. Try to get an AUSA to enforce CFAA violations against a big company as an individual person with a website and they will probably laugh in your face. Remember: there are two sets of laws in the US: ones that apply to you, and another set for large corporations that cooperate with the police and military.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
A class-action suit that would probably last for a couple years and end in a settlement where the claimants - assuming they fill(ed) in forms x, y and z, would be entitled to at best a few hundred dollars. See also the Equifax settlement. I'd say Equifax is the best / most recent example about something like this.

thinkloop 7y ago

Bit of a rub that to request your messy, potentially erroneous, public profile, you have to give private, authenticated identification and contact information - basically the most valuable information they could want, dramatically increasing the value of your profile that you were so concerned about in the first place.

ardy42 7y ago
> Bit of a rub that to request your messy, potentially erroneous, public profile, you have to give private, authenticated identification and contact information - basically the most valuable information they could want, dramatically increasing the value of your profile that you were so concerned about in the first place. The concept of being opted-in by default and being forced to authenticate yourself to opt out is getting more and more ridiculous by the day. These systems need to be opt-in, and that requirement needs to be enforced by some kind of powerful government agency with the power to arrest and jail non-compliant operators. Anything less feels like it would end up being a complete surrender to companies like Clearview AI.
- bostik 7y ago
  I've been thinking about this for a while. A fairly simple solution would be to turn the incentives around. In the EU, people are already the rightful owners of their data, so that needs to be applied world wide. But that's not enough. To really flip the table, we need to make it mandatory to pay people for use of their data. If a company is exploiting[ß] someone else's property, the owner must be compensated for the privilege. Take a page from SaaS companies' nickel-and-diming ("pay per use") billing strategy, too. Just turn it around: forbid blanket permissions and consents. The idea is to ensure that other people's data needs to be universally treated as a toxic liability, not an asset. ß: in economic sense, although other meanings apply equally well.
- tomerv 7y ago
  The governments are the customers of such products. We can't expect them to protect us.

megaman821 7y ago

When it comes to information gathering, I have always assumed if it is technically possible to do, then some agency in the government is doing it. So even if people were able to shame all of Clearview's customers into not using them, that wouldn't stop this type of information gathering form going on.

kick 7y ago
Just because the government has nukes, doesn't mean citizens should have them. The government shouldn't have them, either, but there's not much citizens can do about that outside of revolt. Meanwhile this company has been nothing but privacy abuses and lies to the public. If it isn't broken up by law, it will be interesting to see what the people do.

wolco 7y ago

Is it me or did anyone find the availability of photos to be less than I would have expected. It is worrisome but a facebook could produce a lot more privacy related connections from private photos no one knows existed. I guess I was expecting that.. perhaps in the future facebook will offer this service.

RandallBrown 7y ago
Almost all of those photos were from the guys personal blog and one wasn't even him. I'd be way more worried if it was finding stuff like me in the background of someone else's photo in a crowded city or something like that.
- wideasleep1 7y ago
  To my knowledge, only 1 photo of me exists online (I've never even taken a selfie), in a concert crowd that showed up in our online newspaper. Feeling pretty secure about that.

fg6hr 7y ago

It's interesting how collecting or distributing files with music is a grave crime and corporations can take down anything they don't like with a half-assed DMCA request, with no repercussions for "mistakes", but a person's face image doesn't belong to that person and the same corporations can safely collect and distribute these images for profit.

Mirioron 7y ago
It goes even further than corporations being able to request things from being taken down. Kim Dotcom's house was raided by the FBI in New Zealand over this. He isn't even an American!
- chance_state 7y ago
  >Kim Dotcom's house was raided by the FBI [...] Source? The US asked for his extradition and the NZ authorities raided his home, as far as I know.
  - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    raided at the request of the FBI (which was at the request of the MPAA) might be more accurate.
ArnoVW 7y ago
Actually, in Europe it is illegal to collect personally identifiable information of people without their consent. GDPR and all that. I am surprised they haven't been fined out of existence yet.
- sdoering 7y ago
  Probably because nobody in the EU currently has this company on their screens. Or because those who are critical of this company and its practices have not yet reported it to the relevant authorities. In Germany not only the GDPR regulation but also the so-called "right to the own picture" applies here.This means that no one may use/sell pictures of a person without explicit consent. Therefore, photographers must also have an explicit release of the person for the respective context of use.

battery_cowboy 7y ago

Private companies can do whatever immoral garbage they want, and in exchange for access to the data or the product they developed in an unethical manner, the government slaps them on the wrist, or does nothing, allowing it to get worse and worse and allowing them to assert more control over us. Imagine the story when people find out this or another company started skimming the porn sites with facial recognition, starts gaining access to surveillance footage from Nest or Ring, or maybe even gets access to state and federal DOT cameras and real time feeds from body cameras! Facial recognition is going to need some regulation, ASAP.

nexuist 7y ago
> starts gaining access to surveillance footage from Nest or Ring, or maybe even gets access to state and federal DOT cameras and real time feeds from body cameras! https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-04-banjo-ai-utah-law-enforcement-surveillance.html https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-04-banjo-ai-utah-law-enforc... > The agreement gives the company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and public safety cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles and more. In exchange, Banjo promises to alert law enforcement to "anomalies," aka crimes, but the arrangement raises all kinds of red flags. > Banjo relies on info scraped from social media, satellite imaging data and the real-time info from law enforcement. Banjo claims its "Live Time Intelligence" AI can identify crimes -- everything from kidnappings to shootings and "opioid events" -- as they happen.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shmerl 7y ago

They should be in prison, instead of making money on violating people's privacy.

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

Excerpt: "What does a Clearview profile contain? Up until recently, it would have been almost impossible to find out. Companies like Clearview were not required to share their data, and could easily build massive databases of personal information in secret. Thanks to two landmark pieces of legislation, though, that is changing. In 2018, the European Union began enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). And on January 1, 2020, an equivalent piece of legislation, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), went into effect in my home state. Both GDPR and CCPA give consumers unprecedented access to the personal data that companies like Clearview gather about them. If a consumer submits a valid request, companies are required to provide their data to them. The penalties for noncompliance stretch into the tens of millions of dollars. Several other U.S. states are considering similar legislation, and a federal privacy law is expected in the next five years."

DeathArrow 7y ago

They are using copyrighted images. What if 1000 of copyright owners decide to sue them asking $100 000 each?

Kovah 7y ago
One thing you should be very careful about is licensing. If you post photos on Facebook or Instagram, you automatically grant them a license to redistribute the photo and share it with others. And these "others" can include Clearview. So, Clearview could have a contract with Facebook which legally allows them to get and save those photos. So, you are still the copyright owner, but due to licensing Clearview can legally store and use the photos. About suing them if they would break copyrights: not sure about the US, but in Germany it wouldn't be that easy to actually sue them for such a high sum. You could argue that the company makes money by offering the search service, but there must be evidence that Clearview made that specific sum just with your photo(s), which is very unlikely.
- sdoering 7y ago
  At least if it is a photo in a news story or from a private homepage I would believe they are in trouble. I doubt they have licensing agreements from every news source. And I am sure they do not have them for private homepages.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  They would have to be able to prove that in a lawsuit first. Do they have similar agreements with the alumini magazine? The python coder's meetup group? The personal blog? Just one of those pictures would be enough for a lawsuit. Of course, if someone were to sue, they would be heavily pushed to settle out of court. I suspect there's a lot more legal activity going on about things like this, but everyone that starts to make some noise is quickly silenced with a lump sum and a binding contract to shut up about it. If they don't, they're threatened with spending the next 5-10 years in court. Because if there's anything corporate lawyers are good at, it's stalling and making sure the suing party, especially if it's a random consumer, spends years and hundreds of thousands in court fees. What we need is more rich people suing businesses. Or a massive public defense fund supporting the average joe's case. But right now it's in the rich people's interests to support shady businesses, and if they don't they'll be offered massive financial incentives on the golf course.

MUHAMMADRIZWAN 7y ago

https://t.co/MirDgOtUWY?amp=1 https://t.co/MirDgOtUWY?amp=1

bencollier49 7y ago

Compiling profiles like this without consent is subject to massive fines under GDPR. I find it extremely surprising that they would be responding to GDPR subject access requests, given that they appear to be ignoring the rest of it.

sdoering 7y ago
Not replying would get them in trouble even faster. So probably they hope to appease the one requesting the data.

holler 7y ago

Do the founders of this company have their profiles in the database? What about the other executives and investors? Do those profiles contain all of the same personally identifiable information as any other randomly sampled user? Does it show photos, social media posts, personal contacts, school teachers, addresses, family member data etc? If not, this sort of blunt assault on privacy would make Orwell toss in the grave.

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martin-adams 7y ago

So will we see a new normal that if you delete your data, you’re considered suspicious as it looks like you might be hiding something. Personal data may soon become the same as a credit score. No data, high risk.

fredsanford 7y ago
This is already here with Google if you use oBlock or uMatrix. Endless Captchas... "We detected suspicious blah blah blah"
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  My Recatcha policy: https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102054627041751386 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102054627041751386
  - ThreeFx 7y ago
    Ironically that triggered the CloudFlare check for me.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      A recent change on that instance, and one causing other issues: https://mastodon.cloud/@TheAdmin/103880990266428449 https://mastodon.cloud/@TheAdmin/103880990266428449 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103882090290877356 https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103882090290877356

knolax 7y ago

Wow that last photo doesn't even remotely look like him. I'm more surprised by how bad their facial recognition is than by the data have.

cmarschner 7y ago

Given the „right to be forgotten“ shouldn‘t he be able to request all his data be deleted?

erk__ 7y ago
From the article: > And remember that once you receive your data, you have the option to demand that Clearview delete it or amend it if you’d like them to do so.

LockAndLol 7y ago

I'm not entirely sure what's so shocking about public data, shared willingly by the person to the public, being used to identify the person. If the data weren't/hadn't been shared willingly, I'd definitely see that as a problem. Same thing as if the data were to have been gleaned from non-public sources e.g the person's private belongings or secured digital realms like private forums, password encrypted backups, private profiles, etc.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
It's about trust and permission. If I give e.g. a local news website permission to use my portrait, I do NOT implicitly give permission to Clearview, Google, Facebook, etc to use it for their own purposes. I mean it's implicitly known that anything you post on the internet is public property, but legally that is not the case. Portrait law (at least in my country). You can't just take someone's portrait and use it for your own gains.
- meowface 7y ago
  Are they actually using it, though? Or are they just a search engine presenting public links that are hosting the photos of your face? Is linking to something covered by GDPR? Couldn't this same argument be made for Google reverse image search? Reverse image search someone's face and you're likely to get links to places that photo is located; potentially including links to different photos of their face, as well. They're likely mirroring local copies of the photos as well when they show you the link (in case a link later 404s or changes), but so is Google reverse image search, I believe. If your position is that both things are wrong, that's fine, but would Google then basically have to remove the entire feature? Or prevent searches for any photo containing any faces?
- LunaSea 7y ago
  Actually you do, because scraping is considered legal in the US and your information is on a public site which makes scraping the information legal.
  - 7y ago

Rafuino 7y ago

I submitted an info request about 2 months ago now, and I haven't heard a word from these jackasses

fishmaster 7y ago
Keep going. They risk being fined by not answering.

barnyfried 7y ago

social network victims

sergioisidoro 7y ago

Why are paywalled articles still allowed on HN front page? And why are people still upvoting them?

pjmlp 7y ago
Because some of us agree that not everything is free beer and people that provide information also have bills to pay.
stagas 7y ago
Same frustration here, but this[0] did the job for me. [0]: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
tomhoward 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693084

himinlomax 7y ago

The author says: "If they have — and you’re a resident of California or a citizen of the EU — the company is legally obligated to give you your profile, too." Sure, they're obligated to give you your profile per GDPR. But if you're within the GDPR's jurisdiction, they're obligated to get your consent BEFORE they collect personal information about you. If they haven't, they're liable for at least millions of euros of fines.

yoaviram 7y ago

Send them a GDPR/CCPA deletion request now: https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai https://yourdigitalrights.org/?company=clearview.ai

chippy 7y ago

Would you help and use Clearview if it was being used in your governments strategy against coronavirus? Would you volunteer your time to tag images with your friends and acquaintances, to help slow down the virus? To do otherwise would be immoral and lead to the death of thousands, right? To those worried about that, it's just temporary. It would just last a few months and then you don't need to worry about it any more. This is a global war and we have to make sacrifices and take important actions.

toxicFork 7y ago
"It would just last a few months and then you don't need to worry about it any more." I heard about this before...
newswasboring 7y ago
Yes I will. But only if assurances are made that all this work will be destroyed after the pandemic is over. I give my consent for one task and after that task is over that data should not be used. Its the same case as people being allowed to kill in war but not after. Although weapons are kept after wars strict measures are in place to stop them from reaching unauthorized hands. These measures are not perfect but they are really good and in good faith should be continuously improved.
dabbledash 7y ago
No. This isn’t even a hard question.
- chippy 7y ago
  What if everyone around you told you that by not using it you were contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands? Edits - and what if your friends and family tag you and add your details instead? That way you dont need to actively support it.
  - dabbledash 7y ago
    Isn’t this part of the original question? No. The justification for mass surveillance and totalitarianism is always “it will make us safer in the short term.” No one who knows me will be surprised to find out that I think it creates larger long term dangers or that safety isn’t my highest value in any case. Response to the edit: I don’t know how I would react, because they didn’t have malicious intent, but they still wronged me. I would be angry with them, and it would definitely have a negative effect on our relationships. I wouldn’t look down on anyone who wanted to tag their own photos. And I would be willing to do geo tracking with something that I believed was actually temporary. Give me a dongle I can throw away when this is all over and I’ll carry it around.

shmageggy 7y ago

> For a few million dollars, nearly anyone with a startup background could likely build their own version of Clearview in less than a year. Am I being naive, or is this being overly generous? What about this can not be recreated with an off-the-shelf web scraper and a pretrained facial recognizer?

irjustin 7y ago
Maybe over generous, may be not. We shouldn't get stuck on the accuracy of the dollar amount. The point the author is trying to make is that there will always be "ClearView". So, we need strong legislation around the use of this technology especially when it comes to law enforcement as opposed to trying to kill the idea itself because that's unrealistic. Just as you said, you could start it from your laptop.
sullyj3 7y ago
Probably the scale.
sdan 7y ago
You can even upload the scraped images onto google photos (does a boatload of ai classification) Pretty much anyone with python familiarity can do this.
manmal 7y ago
I think Clearview having indexed basically all public information about people gives them a serious advantage for face recognition and building up a network of relationships between people.
PeterisP 7y ago
It's likely to cost you a few million dollars in hardware and multiple months to run your an off-the-shelf web scraper and a pretrained facial recognizer on a very, very large number of images. There are a lot of images on the internet, bandwidth and compute are not free.

arjunkumar12345 7y ago

My hide 4fune app

arjunkumar12345 7y ago

My haid

101404 7y ago

Why is there no arrest warrant against the managers and owners of Clearview here on the EU? They are using PII of hundreds of millions of Europeans without written consent. That alone should mean billions of euros in fines.

Nextgrid 7y ago
There is no arrest warrant for Google, Facebook or ad network employees either despite them violating the GDPR on a daily basis and very large scale. Granted, the GDPR doesn't say anything about arresting offenders, but the companies should at least be investigated and fined, which isn't happening either. The GDPR is a joke.
- new_here 7y ago
  https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ https://www.enforcementtracker.com/
  - TrickyRick 7y ago
    This exactly, it's very much happening even if you're not reading it in the news every time.
    - a_imho 7y ago
      If you search for Google, you will find one 50M fine. What is the 4% of Google revenue's again? 50M is filed under cost of doing business or the corruption budget if you are not that generous.
      - raverbashing 7y ago
        So you mean the small companies won't get fines of 10Mi dollars as everyone is so quick to claim here?
        a_imho 7y ago

hellofunk 7y ago

> Perhaps most worrying is the fact that some of Clearview’s data is wrong. The last hit on my profile is a link to a Facebook page for an entirely different person. If an investigator searched my face and followed that lead (perhaps suspecting that the person was actually my alias), it’s possible I could be accused of a crime that the unknown, unrelated person whose profile turned up in my report actually did commit. Yikes, this is like Minority Report - level weirdness.

eurekin 7y ago

Honest question - why is author so shocked, given that all the information was public or published by himself?

lolc 7y ago
Humans don't keep track of all things that could be done. I know how what Clearview does is technically possible, but when I see it being done, it shocks me too.
endorphone 7y ago
Probably because it was in disparate places and it seemed unlikely that someone would, or even could, aggregate and correlate it all with enough accuracy to not be junk. There is a difference, or at least there conceptually was, between posting your life story and all of your thoughts on your central LinkedIn profile, versus having two dozen different "blogs" of sorts over the years, Steam accounts, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, usenet groups that come and go and we think of as ethereal. When you see all of that stuff pulled together it could be deeply unsettling. Of course that was foolish -- eventually networking, storage, and computation would allow for everything to be ingested, and facial identification would greatly assist in pulling it together -- but it seemed dystopian at the time.
Lio 7y ago
I think because the idea that someone you don't know and have no relationship with is systematically collating everything they can about you, is a bit like having a stalker. You don't know why they're stalking you. On the face of it it's for law enforcement in case you decide to commit a crime sometime in the future. ...or it could be so that they can raise the prices in shops when you walking and the facial recognition picks you up. ...or it could be for a future employer to decide that the kind of bars you visit means that you're not the right "social fit" for a job. ...or it could be for... anything. You have no control and that's the scary thing.

MUHAMMADRIZWAN 7y ago

http://raboninco.com/1yo5 http://raboninco.com/1yo5

davnn 7y ago

So the difference between this an google‘s reverse image search is that google‘s matching algorithm is worse (probably because it doesn‘t include facial recognition)? Well, public images are public and I don‘t think banning such a service would prevent governments from implementing something like this .. the technological challenges are getting less and less.

sixstringtheory 7y ago
You can presumably hold government officials accountable, but you can’t vote out the CEO of Clearview.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mbrameld 7y ago

Aren't they profiting from the copyrighted works of others without express permission?

minusSeven 7y ago

For people in countries with no clear privacy laws could I also request Clearview to show my data ? Has anyone tried it ?

Funes- 7y ago

Nobody should be posting their private data (pictures or videos, for instance) on a publicly accessible site if they want privacy. Look, if you want your relatives, friends, and even acquaintances to see whatever you want them to, just do it through a medium that allows for private communication. It's just common sense.

vharuck 7y ago
>It's just common sense. Based on what and how people share online, the "common" sense is an expectation of decency in not vacuuming data just because you can. You and I know that's silly, but that's not common sense.

DyslexicAtheist 7y ago

I hope somebody out there in a country that doesn't have an extradition agreement with the US breaks into their systems and publishes the list of their clients. We urgently need a big-style leak of everything these scumbags do. Also countries should start issuing arrest warrants and sanctions against them.

air7 7y ago

The thorny issue here is that this is all public information put forth willingly by people. These are not leaked medical records. In a way these abilities are like a person saying "hmm isn't that the guy from that thing a while back?" What are the limits of what is allowed to do with public data? I don't have a clear opinion.

Skunkleton 7y ago
The data was shared willingly within the understanding of the person making that decision. Do people really understand how much data in their day to day life they have “willingly” shared?
Talyen42 7y ago
I think about it like this: what would happen if you did this manually, at the same scale? If I went around asking every single person you've ever met if they could provide any pictures in which you're in the background, and collected them all and sold them as a collection, i'd be borderline harassing/stalking you. Not necessarily straight up illegal, but maybe in some ways? That's what this is, digitally.
njkleiner 7y ago
> These are not leaked medical records. In a way these abilities are like a person saying "hmm isn't that the guy from that thing a while back?" That's why I don't think there is much of a point in trying to prevent people (e.g. by law) from crawling and using data in this fashion. I feel like the only reasonable solution here would be to force these companies to rebuild their databases by legally limiting the lifetime of such data. That way people have a chance to remove themselves from the database by changing/deleting their online profiles without having to use legal measures like GDPR requests. People wouldn't even have to be aware of any individual database they might be part of; they would be removed from it automatically at some point. Another benefit of this would be that the pure cost of constantly re-crawling a giant dataset could act as a limiting factor and therefore prevent abuse.
- gowld 7y ago

drivebycomment 7y ago

A related thought experiment. What if Google or Bing build an image search service based on the face recognition ? If you don't like that idea, how about doing that for celebrities and public figures? If you are ok with one but not the other, what would be a good line distinguishing them and guiding principle? If you are not ok with either or ok with both, why? More I think about it, more I lean toward allowing both, but I can see why people would not like it.

brandonmenc 7y ago
> If you are ok with one but not the other, what would be a good line distinguishing them and guiding principle? Because celebrity by definition requires trading privacy for fame, and is almost always a decision. We need a new legal classification for "public, but not accessible by everyone in the world for the rest of time" information, which is what most regular people assume or desire for themselves.

joshwa 7y ago

Yandex Image Search already uses facial recognition and is available to the public. See: https://yandex.com/images https://yandex.com/images https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/facial-recognition-for-the-public-yandex/ https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/facial-recogniti... https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guide-to-using-reverse-image-search-for-investigations/ https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...

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