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Opt out of Clearview.ai
- hellcow 6y agoI filled this out weeks ago... never got any response.
- enahs-sf 6y agoI'm mildly terrified that it's going into another training data set somewhere.
- bonestamp2 6y agoAgreed. Depending on which option you choose, this could further improve their model. For example, they could use it to confirm your identity and improve recognition of you. Even if they never disclosed your id, they could use it reject subjects that would otherwise have a possibility of being you.
- carapace 6y agoOf course it is. These people are sociopaths.
- xmodem 6y agoWhich category are you in? I just submitted an access request under the EU resident category. If I don't get a response I will consider making another request in writing.
- hellcow 6y agoCCPA here. I submitted an info request, a data-deletion request, and an opt-out request. I got 0 responses. At what point does an investigator take a look at this?
- xmodem 6y agoI would hope the state of California would care. I have no idea how you're meant to try to enforce your rights under CCPA other than by hiring a lawyer. I filed a complaint with my local data protection authority a couple of years back. We had to integrate a credit reporting API and I noticed that it required no authentication other than a username. I also observed that who was preforming the check was a field we could specify in the request and it was not validated (I did a check on myself with the SoapUI default of '?'). I did not receive a response. So unfortunately I think our options for actually enforcing our rights are probably limited. Still, I guess we'll find out if Clearview takes GDPR any more seriously than CCPA.
- lux 6y agoNo option for people outside those regions?
- bravoetch 6y agoThe current law in a few areas allows them to collect all your data, then offer you to opt-out. There's no requirement for them to not collect private data, and there's no requirement most places for them to offer you an opt-out. My question is how do we get people to stop working for places like clearview and google and facebook that all work against the public good?
- lux 6y agoYou're totally right. The sky-high salaries + options + bonuses make it a hard sell to get devs to follow their values in choosing employers. I just found it telling how grudgingly this complies with the law, but you could say privacy violation is their core service so obviously they need to protect that.
- jbverschoor 6y agolol I dunno if I wanna send "a clear photo of you"
- fyp 6y agoUse a profile picture that's already public and have been crawled a bajillion times. E.g. https://twitter.com/jbverschoor/photo https://twitter.com/jbverschoor/photo
- tozeur 6y agoJust submitted. Curious to see what they have
- bostik 6y agoThis page should not be even needed. Having your data be in something like this should be opt-in.
- oefrha 6y agoWhat if I'm a former California resident? Does the law say they have to delete photos of me taken in California?
- irscott 6y agoMy guess is that if you no longer live in CA you're no longer covered under the CCPA so no. It's about residence, not where the photos were taken.
- codemac 6y agoMy understanding is no, only current individuals with current residency. However - it's probably harder for them to figure that out than to just take your word for it. They require a photo of a government issued ID for some stuff, so if you have an old ID that may work.
- newscracker 6y agoShould every person start keeping a list of all privacy intrusions and then opt out? That’s never going to work out due to user fatigue, which is what all these opt out platforms depend on (that nobody will go through the trouble of doing it). (Not exactly the same) Just like Facebook announced a few years ago asking users to send it nude photos just so it could take down nude photos of that person, this also is ripe for abuse. It’s a matter of when, not if, they opt out information also leaks.
- throwaway55554 6y agoDid FB provide the option to just take them all down in the case where there does not exist a nude photo of someone? Or just take them all down unconditionally? If not, was it too difficult for them to think of this option?
- jchook 6y agoThere are a couple services that opt-out for you. Often times your information will re-appear on the same site months later, too, so they provide monitoring. https://brandyourself.com/protect-your-privacy-online https://brandyourself.com/protect-your-privacy-online https://onerep.com/ https://onerep.com/ Full disclosure: I helped develop the BrandYourself platform.
- SebastianKra 6y agoI tried out brandyourself.com. Once with my real info (against all reason), the second time I entered some random name and adress that couldn't possibly be real. In both cases, I was told that I was highly exposed and that I should pay hundreds of $ per year to protect my privacy. Also, I recognized several dark/shady design patterns. I can only conclude that this is a very elaborate way to scare people out of money.
- jchook 6y agoGreat feedback thank you. You may have tried an early beta version. The product now does a free private info scan up-front and displays all records found. The premium version systematically opts-out of every record found, and continues monitoring the data broker sites for your information. The system actually verifies the removals too, and will display the status of each record in the UI.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoAs a California or EU resident, shouldn't it be illegal for it to be opt-out? (edit: on further reading it looks like GDPR requires opt in, while CCPA seems to only require opt in for people younger than 16, and requires opt-out for people 16 or older, which is some bullshit) Regardless, I should be able to say "I'm opting out" and the onus should be on them to figure out how to do it, rather than me submitting enough pictures for them to recognize and exclude me from their crawler. This seems against even CCPA. (another edit since this pisses me off so much: The page linked says "Alternatively, you can email: privacy-requests@clearview.ai" so I'm just going to email them to tell them I opt out. They can figure out how to comply with my opt out)
- stiray 6y agoThere is a slight problem (i am not sure if this is valid case, just thinking loud), if the data were gathered from public sources like fb, they might argue that those data are public.
- bosie 6y agoWhat part of fb is considered a 'public source'?
- Nextgrid 6y agoIf you make your profile available publicly then I'd argue it is indeed public. As far as I'm aware, Clearview doesn't have a relationship with Facebook to access non-public data and instead they just operate a web crawler storing anything that's being served without requiring auth.
- znfi 6y agoIANAL but I think the GDPR does not just look at the data in isolation, but considers the data and what it is used for. Thus if I give a company access to my data it does not give them a carte blanche to use it however they see fit, instead I have allowed usage of the data for a set of purposes.
- throwaway55554 6y agoWhy TF should the burden be on me? So tired of this. Everything should be opt-in. You don't have permission unless I explicitly give it to you!
- kick 6y agoPermission isn't needed; fascists don't ask for consent. If it really riles you up, which it should, you should go and pressure your legislators into creating legislation that prevents them from doing what they're doing.
- rendx 6y agoThis is already the case with GDPR, which is clearly ignored here since plenty of people from GDPR regions seem to be affected.
- concernedCity 6y agoThere's something very wrong about some random company being able to collect lots of data about you where the only way to stop it is to _somehow_ know about the company and opt out _after_ it collects that data.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoFeels pretty bad. I suspect things will have to get worse before they get better. But then again we have the 3 big credit reporting agencies, and they don't seem to be going anywhere.
- GordonS 6y agoAnd they collect and process this data even if you're a member of the EU - surely this is against the GDPR? I realise the photos they have are publicly available, but that only means I've consented for them to be displayed on Github, Facebook or wherever - it doesn't mean I've consented for some scummy startup to hoover up all my data, process it and index it. And you have to send them a clear photo of yourself to opt-out... there is something very wrong with that. I don't believe for one second that they don't have, for example, my email address.
- hoschicz 6y agoIs there a deadline for them to reply to my Data Access Request Form?
- rendx 6y agoAt least under GDPR, yes: "If your company receives a request from an individual who wants to exercise their rights, you should respond to this request without undue delay and in any case within 1 month of receiving the request. This response time may be extended by 2 months for complex or multiple requests, as long as the individual is informed about the extension. Requests should be dealt with free of charge. If a request is rejected, then you must inform the individual of the reasons for doing so and of their right to file a complaint with the Data Protection Authority." https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers/data-protection/data-protection-gdpr/index_en.htm#shortcut-9 https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/dealing-with-customers... It's directly in the GDPR itself, which everyone should take them time and read in full anyway. It's not very complex. And I mean everyone, including people from non-GDPR countries! https://gdpr-info.eu/art-12-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-12-gdpr/ Article 12, Paragraph 3
- dariusj18 6y agoDoes doing this put you on a list?
- cgb223 6y agoFor those of us that aren’t familiar, what exactly is Clearview.ai?
- jedixit 6y agoIt builds a detailed profile of you based on your public data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207
- stonogo 6y agoA startup: Face classification and person tracking via photo scraping social media, as a service, offered to law enforcement agencies, and they keep getting hacked.
- cgb223 6y agoIf they keep scraping does that mean I have to keep opting out?
- alteria 6y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but if you opt-out, they agree to stop adding to stuff they can identify as yours. That doesn't stop another company from doing the same. And that's the problem. There are so many companies that we don't know about.
- jcahill 6y agoBusiness logic fades. Being on the list of companies that pulled this shit is forever, plus or minus an asteroid impact or two.
- api 6y agoKnowing what I know about the sketch factor of this company I am reluctant to interact with them in any way, as this would just give them more data.
- irscott 6y agoIf you're not covered under CCPA or GDPR (most of the world) then you're just shit outta luck. Cool.
- zbjornson 6y agoIf you both opt-out and request data deletion, how do they keep you opt'ed-out? That seems impossible for them to comply with.
- pjs_ 6y agoPlease self-identify as a deviant by filling out this form...
- sixstringtheory 6y ago> There's no point acting all surprised about it; the plans and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your earth years. If you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoAn opt-out that requires you to give them exactly what they want and requires them to keep it is crap. Its not 'opt-out' its 'make less available'. The Ad Choices opt-out is the same thing - better not delete your cookies if you want to 'opt-out' - total BS. Scumbag authoritarians.
- time0ut 6y agoCould I just say I'm a resident of CA or the EU? Clearview supposedly doesn't have any info other than public images, so how would they know the difference?
- klmadfejno 6y agoI also wonder this. Further, what if you built a bot that simply scraped photos of people and submitted all of them to Clearview? Are they legally able to refuse ANY of the submissions?
- bla3 6y agoGiven their justification for their product, I wonder what they'd think of someone crawling images on the web and sending automated opt-outs for all crawled images that contain a face...
- buildbot 6y agoFor anyone with more legal knowledge than I have, how does scraping and processing social media and other image sources deal with copyright license, especially ones forbidding commercial use. I feel like there's a meaningful legal difference between a totally public, open to be downloaded image of you from the internet, even storing it forever, and then using that in a product. It would be like taking something with a GPL license - totally legit to download and use and modify and repost, with the original license/copyright attached - and using it in a closed source commercial product.
- coopsmgoops 6y agoI've been wondering the same thing. The photo either belongs to the user or to Facebook, just because it's viewable on the site doesn't give Clearview the right to use it. It must be a violation of the terms of service and I'm surprised we haven't heard anything from Facebook about it.
- buildbot 6y agoThey say they scraped the open web - so for example this would include many of our personal sites, many of which have profile pictures. For myself, I took the picture on my site, and it's under a: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives CC license. I'd argue that 1. Using my/anyone's profile picture in an AI system for profit is commercial use. 2. A neural network is a derivative work of all images used to train that network.
- cmendel 6y agoSo on point 1 I agree with you. I think point 2 is pretty iffy though. Unless there has been some recent legal proceeding that I am unaware of, point 2 isn't true.
- buildbot 6y agoOh yeah, I'm not sure either are true legally as I'm not a lawyer - just my opinion. The reasoning I follow for point 2 is: That if a neural network is not derivative of its inputs, and given a sufficiently large gan, you could "launder" inputs into copy-write free outputs. That's also not been done as far as I know, but I know it's starting to be an issue in NLP.
- Rafuino 6y agoI made a request for data access on February 12, and I still haven't heard a word from these asshats. Don't hold your breath on them actually honoring the request. I realllllly can't wait for CCPA enforcement to start this summer, though I know privacy invasive tech companies are lobbying to have enforcement delayed.
- tiny_epoch 6y agoPresuming one follows through on this, how can I trust that I am in fact opted-out?
- lootsauce 6y agoMy massive level of cynicism on this subject makes things like this seem completely unsurprising. I generally feel that the Binney and Snowden revelations served to normalize knowledge of being systematically monitored by big brother. This common knowledge of being watched is absolutely necessary for a surveillance state to function as intended. The gold mine of private data made available to them via National Security Letters and other such mandates to provide access. Surveillance capitalism is not really about capitalism at all but thats just my cynical side again.
- praveenhm 6y agoTo opt-out you need to upload a clear photo, this is more rishy..
- jennyyang 6y agoIs there a way to "poison" the results of Clearview by adding images of yourself over a short period time that distort your features?
- throwaway837373 6y agoI have a better idea - how about instead of giving them even more identifying information, we file a class action lawsuit instead?
- time0ut 6y agoTheir opt out system is driven by typeform.com. I'm not familiar with this service, but it seems to have caps of at most 10k opt out requests per month and 4GB of uploaded images. They might be on an enterprise contract with different caps though. I know one way to find out... Are there legal implications if you cannot submit an opt out request because of their technical choices?
- polymorph1sm 6y ago"Your request cannot be accepted because that link is still public." got this message when trying to deindex my image. Sadly for general public (the rest of the world), you can only "opt out" if your image source was removed.
- hoppla 6y agoI would like to exercise my rights under GDPR, but are not allowed. Why is Norway excluded from the GFPR form? They only accept EU/UK/Switzerland
- sebastien_bois 6y ago> "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." Not much of an "opt-out".