Clearview AI Challenges Facial Recognition Privacy and the Future of Anonymity

At the Last Futurist we write a lot about privacy in technology and the future of human rights online, given the lack luster regulation in the AI and BigTech space. But threats to our freedom come from all sides.

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When we think of violations of human rights with the weaponization of facial recognition we usually consider the startups that are the global leaders in China.

However, Clearview A.I. scrapes billions of photos from public sites like Facebook , LinkedIn and Twitter. They have amassed billions of photos, certainly most of you that exist online already.

As they trade and share this data for profit, it's yet another push into the end of privacy. An internet where profit rules over our own personal privacy.

What happens when this data is centralized as it has been?  Clearview has scrapped Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites. Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images. That sounds like what the Chinese Government has been doing with its social credit system.

In a world where Google Ads look nearly indistinguishable from regular search results and Facebook might be in league with politicians, you have to wonder at the modern internet and corruption. Is Clearview AI and its kin the final end of privacy? The Ad-firms that shared and sold our data are themselves security risks to the future of human rights online. AI is not being regulated properly in 2020, and it's still the wild-wild west.

How good is facial recognition getting? If you were in a restaurant having a sensitive conversation about family secrets or work secrets, a stranger next to you could snap your photo and know who you are, and understand that conversation in context. Think about the implications of that. We can debate the chilling privacy risks, but facial recognition isn't going to go away anytime soon. We have to accept this new society where we are less and less private and our human rights online also appear to be in jeopardy on so many fronts.

Are We Witnessing the End of Privacy?

This data never stays centralized. Clearview AI has a vast database of everyone that the police departments are interested in. Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts issued an open letter Thursday demanding answers from the creator of a controversial facial recognition app used by US law enforcement. 

We are living in an era where car and retail companies must become "technology companies", at the dawning of the internet of things revolution. This also means in many ways, the end of privacy.

The company behind the app is sort of mysterious, but has in recent months licensed its powerful face-recognition AI to hundreds of law enforcement agencies. Twitter prohibits users from using its platform for "facial recognition," on its restricted uses page. That hasn't stopped Clearview AI.

So consider the new era of non-anonymous ID. Without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list.

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Everything about you online ever could soon be accessible by anyone. The end of anonymous ID online would mean an internet that never forgets.

Here we have law enforcement agencies using illegally collected human data. If that's not a corrupt state of the regulation of AI, I don't know what is. Even Apple is now giving back-door access to the FBI. In the 2020s, AI will morph into a tool so powerful, people will have less freedom. That's not a better world necessarily, but it is a different one.

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