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These are good questions that EVERYONE needs to ask. What Happens When MY Face Is Tracked Everywhere I Go? I think it's really important that as many people a

These are good questions that EVERYONE needs to ask. What Happens When MY Face Is Tracked Everywhere I Go? I think it's really important that as many people as possible understand what is happening with Clearview, and everything else. It's important that as many people as possible take some time and understand how all types of tracking work, both on and offline now. If "we" as a society learn what's going on and shrug, then oh well, Clearview wins I guess. I hope that if everyone knows what's going on "we" will push back with... well I don't know what. Better laws/regulations? As someone who talks privacy/security quite often, I am still surprised at just how little most people know/care about privacy. Most people, even after they learn a bit about what's going on, just don't care. They'll read this story and come away with "They caught a pedophile, this is a good thing! I have nothing to hide, bring it on." It feels like "we" privacy/security folks are just fighting a losing battle.

rvanmil 6y ago
I feel the same and it has led me to conclude that this is a situation where things have to get (a lot) worse before they can get better, and only through legislation. I've been thinking about how it seems like we're living in the 50s of smoking except this time it's privacy and social media. Perhaps we can learn something from the tobacco control playbook...
- indymike 6y ago
  Tobacco control has been a big fail, all that has really happened is that government and tobacco became co-dependent. People are still dying from tobacco related disease (I've lost close family members to this), and the product is sold everywhere. I would hope we do not model anything on "tobacco control".
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    Idk, the younger generation see it as filthy and don't go near it for the most part. Seems to have finally paid off.
    - bongoman37 6y ago
      The younger generation is rapidly cozying up to smoking marijuana.
      - dathos 6y ago
        Do you have some data for that? And I wonder if and how this affects the big problem we have with alcohol abuse at any age.
        MonkeyClub 6y ago
        Finding data for this is a walk in the park (ha ha).
  - gruez 6y ago
    >Tobacco control has been a big fail Can you elaborate on this? Short of treating tobacco like heroin, what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use?
    - throwaway210222 6y ago
      "what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use? " Make people with traces of nicotine in their blood ineligible for free health care. Including emergency care. Focus their minds.
  - altcognito 6y ago
    While I don't think we would disagree that cigarettes are still sold and there are still smokers, the problem is a fraction of what it was. That's not fail at all.
    - indymike 6y ago
      Its taken us 400+ years to get to this point. The science was in on smoking in 1948. It has taken over 70 years to get what progress we have had. That's a lot of lives cut short and a lot of suffering.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Unfortunately I suspect this is somewhat of a Pandora's box situation. There's only so much legislation can do once this technology becomes commonplace. Even in a hypothetical extreme scenario where facial recognition technology were completely banned the software would still exist and there'd still be databases of people's faces floating around the web. All legislation would do is create a situation where it's "illegal" to use software to identify people from a picture of their face even though just about everybody knows how to do so trivially and secretly.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    Harsh penalty and strict enforcement should do quite well. If you want to be a database of private information, the burden is on you to comply with privacy laws. If I assert you have collected my face and stored it illegally in a database (i.e. without my consent), a regulator should be able to quickly follow up for compliance, and if found to be out of compliance, penalty is imposed. TCPA works really well for call centers, and CAN-SPAM works really well for email marketing platforms. There's no reason a similar piece of legislation for facial recognition could not be passed.
    - Ajedi32 6y ago
      Sure, you can stop legitimate US companies from using your face that way. But what happens when the database isn't hosted in the US, or is distributed anonymously by a peer-to-peer network. TCPA and CAN-SPAM are hardly what I'd call effective. I still get tons of spam calls and emails. I'm not saying legislation is a bad idea; just that it's not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle.
      - michaelt 6y ago
        Unlike spam (which can trivially be sent across jurisdictional borders) you can't point a new camera at a San Francisco resident without being in California.
        da_big_ghey 6y ago
- rapjr9 6y ago
  One thing that might motivate lawmakers is if someone starts tracking THEM (with license plate readers, face trackers, camera based heart+breath monitors, Bluetooth/WiFi/Cellular trackers, etc.) and makes the data public. It's currently legal for anyone to do this in the USA as far as I know. Perhaps some cities have laws limiting their police but I don't think they limit the public or corporations. Do talk to a lawyer before making the data public though. You could do this on a personal level also, use your phones camera and start telling people their heart rate, breathing rate, radio emissions, etc., to raise awareness. Start saying "Hi" to them before they are within site range of you when you detect their phones transmissions. People may start to think you're a creep, but they'll certainly start to recognize that they are at the mercy of creeps. A likely outcome would be a ban on remote sensing during workplace meetings or at the workplace in general which could lead to a nationwide ban eventually. I don't think anyone's boss would like their employees monitoring their heart rate or stress level during meetings or using that to get an advantage over other employees. Or maybe everyone will love it, you could automatically terminate meetings if everyone's stress level gets too high and people may become more forgiving if they find out what raises other peoples stress levels. You can get heart rate from cameras and variability in heart rate is strongly correlated with stress.
amelius 6y ago
Can't these Clearview folks find some other interesting thing to work on? It's not like there is a shortage of technical challenges. Sheesh. Not every market gap needs to be filled.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  You seem to be ignoring the large number of people who seem to be interested in a large exit, who will look for ANYTHING a target audience will pay for and do it to scale, because. And the other group of people who will assist those in power to maintain it, because trickle down. You can open your original sentence out to "Can't these <insert any potentially harmful project> folks find some other interesting thing to work on?" As long as there is some sort of incentive on the other end, someone will be interested.
  - amelius 6y ago
    In today's economy, engineers can literally choose what they work on. For a decent income, there is no need to work on unethical things. There simply is no excuse.
Sleepytime 6y ago
Not necessarily directed at the parent comment (who seems more at a loss than thinking it's a solution), but calling for laws and regulations to restrain a state that regularly ignores laws and regulations already on the books feels very lazy (slacktivism?) to me, and is all too common a trope on HN. Call me pessimistic but I really don't think that the kind of elites that will use illegal metadata to drone strike their own citizens and their children (among numerous other atrocities) will suddenly behave if we just put a few more of 'The Right Laws and Regulations'™ in this time. The only answer to the privacy and security question is to be principled enough to do what you can to opt out even if it's difficult. Yes I get it, you don't want to alienate some percentage of your social circle/users/customers. But that attitude contributed to how we got here in the first place. You may be pleasantly surprised how many people will be willing to follow along if you ask them directly and are willing to help them do it. I thanked a friend for getting set up on matrix after I deleted all my other services and he told me "even though I still use whatsapp you have a good reason not to and you know more about this stuff than I do so I'm happy to use element to chat with you". I haven't had a friend that I made a personal appeal to turn me down yet. "I'll create your user on my server. It's nobody's but ours and it runs from my living room" goes a long way, apparently. My personal roadmap (ymmv): - Use tech that makes your adversaries job harder. For me this is things like no JavaScript (plain pages in general), FOSS/OSHW, walled gardens, cash/cryptonumismatics, mirror things on RSS/yggdrasil/gemini/alternate dns roots/ipfs. Self host. You get the idea. - Help others do the same. Cultivate a community. Make topical group chats/forums/pages. Mirror the content of things you would like to see. - Make your employers do the same, and be willing to say no to things that are counter productive to that goal. - Regularly make your friends/coworkers/boss confront the idea that they do have something to hide. Ask them to hand you their phone and tell you their password, ask for naked pictures of them/their family, ask them to install a parental control app that gives you their location/microphone/browsing history/etc, ask if you can put some cameras in their house/bedroom/bathroom (bonus points if you bring a camera over). - Obviously tailor the above to the situation and remind them that they do in fact want privacy. Don't ask a co-worker for naked pictures what is wrong with you? - People are wrongfully arrested on a regular basis based on minimal evidence. Amplify their stories. - Rotate usernames regularly. Anyway that's what I do. It hasn't been nearly as rough of an experience as I thought it would be. Thanks for hearing me out. Welcome to the panopticon, friends.
dfxm12 6y ago
If "we" as a society learn what's going on and shrug, then oh well, Clearview wins I guess. It doesn't matter if we shrug or not. Big business always wins. One of our best shots at a material change is to elect more people like Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders to congress.

rvanmil 6y ago

I feel the same and it has led me to conclude that this is a situation where things have to get (a lot) worse before they can get better, and only through legislation. I've been thinking about how it seems like we're living in the 50s of smoking except this time it's privacy and social media. Perhaps we can learn something from the tobacco control playbook...

indymike 6y ago
Tobacco control has been a big fail, all that has really happened is that government and tobacco became co-dependent. People are still dying from tobacco related disease (I've lost close family members to this), and the product is sold everywhere. I would hope we do not model anything on "tobacco control".
- throwaways885 6y ago
  Idk, the younger generation see it as filthy and don't go near it for the most part. Seems to have finally paid off.
  - bongoman37 6y ago
    The younger generation is rapidly cozying up to smoking marijuana.
    - dathos 6y ago
      Do you have some data for that? And I wonder if and how this affects the big problem we have with alcohol abuse at any age.
      - MonkeyClub 6y ago
        Finding data for this is a walk in the park (ha ha).
- gruez 6y ago
  >Tobacco control has been a big fail Can you elaborate on this? Short of treating tobacco like heroin, what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use?
  - throwaway210222 6y ago
    "what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use? " Make people with traces of nicotine in their blood ineligible for free health care. Including emergency care. Focus their minds.
- altcognito 6y ago
  While I don't think we would disagree that cigarettes are still sold and there are still smokers, the problem is a fraction of what it was. That's not fail at all.
  - indymike 6y ago
    Its taken us 400+ years to get to this point. The science was in on smoking in 1948. It has taken over 70 years to get what progress we have had. That's a lot of lives cut short and a lot of suffering.
Ajedi32 6y ago
Unfortunately I suspect this is somewhat of a Pandora's box situation. There's only so much legislation can do once this technology becomes commonplace. Even in a hypothetical extreme scenario where facial recognition technology were completely banned the software would still exist and there'd still be databases of people's faces floating around the web. All legislation would do is create a situation where it's "illegal" to use software to identify people from a picture of their face even though just about everybody knows how to do so trivially and secretly.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  Harsh penalty and strict enforcement should do quite well. If you want to be a database of private information, the burden is on you to comply with privacy laws. If I assert you have collected my face and stored it illegally in a database (i.e. without my consent), a regulator should be able to quickly follow up for compliance, and if found to be out of compliance, penalty is imposed. TCPA works really well for call centers, and CAN-SPAM works really well for email marketing platforms. There's no reason a similar piece of legislation for facial recognition could not be passed.
  - Ajedi32 6y ago
    Sure, you can stop legitimate US companies from using your face that way. But what happens when the database isn't hosted in the US, or is distributed anonymously by a peer-to-peer network. TCPA and CAN-SPAM are hardly what I'd call effective. I still get tons of spam calls and emails. I'm not saying legislation is a bad idea; just that it's not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      Unlike spam (which can trivially be sent across jurisdictional borders) you can't point a new camera at a San Francisco resident without being in California.
      - da_big_ghey 6y ago
rapjr9 6y ago
One thing that might motivate lawmakers is if someone starts tracking THEM (with license plate readers, face trackers, camera based heart+breath monitors, Bluetooth/WiFi/Cellular trackers, etc.) and makes the data public. It's currently legal for anyone to do this in the USA as far as I know. Perhaps some cities have laws limiting their police but I don't think they limit the public or corporations. Do talk to a lawyer before making the data public though. You could do this on a personal level also, use your phones camera and start telling people their heart rate, breathing rate, radio emissions, etc., to raise awareness. Start saying "Hi" to them before they are within site range of you when you detect their phones transmissions. People may start to think you're a creep, but they'll certainly start to recognize that they are at the mercy of creeps. A likely outcome would be a ban on remote sensing during workplace meetings or at the workplace in general which could lead to a nationwide ban eventually. I don't think anyone's boss would like their employees monitoring their heart rate or stress level during meetings or using that to get an advantage over other employees. Or maybe everyone will love it, you could automatically terminate meetings if everyone's stress level gets too high and people may become more forgiving if they find out what raises other peoples stress levels. You can get heart rate from cameras and variability in heart rate is strongly correlated with stress.

amelius 6y ago

Can't these Clearview folks find some other interesting thing to work on? It's not like there is a shortage of technical challenges. Sheesh. Not every market gap needs to be filled.

zentiggr 6y ago
You seem to be ignoring the large number of people who seem to be interested in a large exit, who will look for ANYTHING a target audience will pay for and do it to scale, because. And the other group of people who will assist those in power to maintain it, because trickle down. You can open your original sentence out to "Can't these <insert any potentially harmful project> folks find some other interesting thing to work on?" As long as there is some sort of incentive on the other end, someone will be interested.
- amelius 6y ago
  In today's economy, engineers can literally choose what they work on. For a decent income, there is no need to work on unethical things. There simply is no excuse.

Sleepytime 6y ago

Not necessarily directed at the parent comment (who seems more at a loss than thinking it's a solution), but calling for laws and regulations to restrain a state that regularly ignores laws and regulations already on the books feels very lazy (slacktivism?) to me, and is all too common a trope on HN. Call me pessimistic but I really don't think that the kind of elites that will use illegal metadata to drone strike their own citizens and their children (among numerous other atrocities) will suddenly behave if we just put a few more of 'The Right Laws and Regulations'™ in this time. The only answer to the privacy and security question is to be principled enough to do what you can to opt out even if it's difficult. Yes I get it, you don't want to alienate some percentage of your social circle/users/customers. But that attitude contributed to how we got here in the first place. You may be pleasantly surprised how many people will be willing to follow along if you ask them directly and are willing to help them do it. I thanked a friend for getting set up on matrix after I deleted all my other services and he told me "even though I still use whatsapp you have a good reason not to and you know more about this stuff than I do so I'm happy to use element to chat with you". I haven't had a friend that I made a personal appeal to turn me down yet. "I'll create your user on my server. It's nobody's but ours and it runs from my living room" goes a long way, apparently. My personal roadmap (ymmv): - Use tech that makes your adversaries job harder. For me this is things like no JavaScript (plain pages in general), FOSS/OSHW, walled gardens, cash/cryptonumismatics, mirror things on RSS/yggdrasil/gemini/alternate dns roots/ipfs. Self host. You get the idea. - Help others do the same. Cultivate a community. Make topical group chats/forums/pages. Mirror the content of things you would like to see. - Make your employers do the same, and be willing to say no to things that are counter productive to that goal. - Regularly make your friends/coworkers/boss confront the idea that they do have something to hide. Ask them to hand you their phone and tell you their password, ask for naked pictures of them/their family, ask them to install a parental control app that gives you their location/microphone/browsing history/etc, ask if you can put some cameras in their house/bedroom/bathroom (bonus points if you bring a camera over). - Obviously tailor the above to the situation and remind them that they do in fact want privacy. Don't ask a co-worker for naked pictures what is wrong with you? - People are wrongfully arrested on a regular basis based on minimal evidence. Amplify their stories. - Rotate usernames regularly. Anyway that's what I do. It hasn't been nearly as rough of an experience as I thought it would be. Thanks for hearing me out. Welcome to the panopticon, friends.

dfxm12 6y ago

If "we" as a society learn what's going on and shrug, then oh well, Clearview wins I guess. It doesn't matter if we shrug or not. Big business always wins. One of our best shots at a material change is to elect more people like Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders to congress.