About Face (Recognition)
1Description
Is your face truly your own, or is it a commodity to be sold, a weapon to be used against you? A company called Clearview AI has scraped the internet to gather (without consent) 30 billion images to support a tool that lets users identify people by picture alone. Though it’s primarily used by law enforcement, should we have to worry that the eavesdropper at the next restaurant table, or the creep who’s bothering you in the bar, or the protestor outside the abortion clinic can surreptitiously snap a pic of you, upload it, and use it to identify you, where you live and work, your social media accounts, and more?
New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill has been writing about the intersection of privacy and technology for well over a decade; her book about Clearview AI’s rise and practices was published last fall. She speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how face recognition technology’s rapid evolution may have outpaced ethics and regulations, and where we might go from here.
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
- The difficulty of anticipating how information that you freely share might be used against you as technology advances.
- How the all-consuming pursuit of “technical sweetness” — the alluring sensation of neatly and functionally solving a puzzle — can blind tech developers to the implications of that tech’s use.
- The racial biases that were built into many face recognition technologies.
- How one state's 2008 law has effectively curbed how face recognition technology is used there, perhaps creating a model for other states or Congress to follow.
Kashmir Hill is a New York Times tech reporter who writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways technology is changing our lives, particularly when it comes to our privacy. Her book, “Your Face Belongs To Us” (2023), details how Clearview AI gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it. She joined The Times in 2019 after having worked at Gizmodo Media Group, Fusion, Forbes Magazine and Above the Law. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. She has degrees from Duke University and New York University, where she studied journalism.
This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators. This episode features:
United States
I think this tool is destructive, and this is only the surface level of what we think it can and will do. but not ultimately how it'll eventually be used against us both personally and within the government and law enforcement. I thinknit should be banned as a whole. I also think CA law is kind of doing itself a disservice because in such a age of 'information' many people are very misinformed and not educated enough on tech and the dangers of it, even if something seems like a great idea. we need to do a better job of educating people of basic rights, privacy, and identity protection. I feel we've become very lazy and think, if the government says it's good or the law enforcement says it's great. We should all be on board. Tech has had more cons than positives in the past 15 years.