Tag: facial recognition
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Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm
Written by Kashmir Hill on The New York Times.
“We’ve been active in trying to sound the alarm bells around facial recognition, both as a threat to privacy when it works and a racist threat to everyone when it doesn’t,” said Phil Mayor, an attorney at [American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan]. “We know these stories are out there, but they’re hard to hear about because people don’t usually realize they’ve been the victim of a bad facial recognition search.”
Read ‘Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm’ on the The New York Times site.
Tagged with: facial recognition, algorithmic bias, racism.
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Coronavirus, facial recognition, and the future of privacy
Written by Khari Johnson on Venturebeat.
“If quarantines are ineffective or improperly carried out, millions of people could die, according to some estimates, but that doesn’t mean we can throw civil liberties out the window.
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Aside from the spread of COVID-19, the other prevailing story this week was a rush of revelations about companies peddling AI-powered surveillance technology to businesses, governments, and law enforcement agencies.
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Global economies are bracing for recession, and no one knows exactly how the spread of COVID-19 will impact global supply chains, public events, travel, and other industries. And even as we’re actively discussing whether a company like Clearview AI will mean the end of privacy, COVID-19 could easily be used as an excuse to spread mass surveillance.
This is not intended to be alarmist, but it’s important to keep an eye on mission creep in this space.”
Read ‘Coronavirus, facial recognition, and the future of privacy’ on the Venturebeat site.
Tagged with: coronavirus, facial recognition, mass surveillance.
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Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too
Written by Anna Merlan on Motherboard.
“You may have forgotten about the photos you uploaded to a then-popular social media site ten or fifteen years ago… but Clearview hasn’t,” Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an email. “A lot of data about individuals can quickly become ‘stale’ and thus low-value by those seeking to monetize it. Jobs, salaries, addresses, phone numbers, those all change. But photos are different: your face doesn’t go stale.”
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“What is clear is that this information is available to far more people than Clearview likes to acknowledge, and that they have future, as-yet-unannounced plans for their photos of your face.”
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“The face search results show exactly why we need a moratorium on face surveillance. In a democratic society, we should not accept our images being secretly collected and retained to create a mass surveillance database to be used, disclosed, and analyzed at the whim of an unaccountable company.”—Jeramie D. Scott
Tagged with: Clearview AI, facial recognition, surveillance.
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I’m a trans woman. Google Photos doesn’t know how to categorize me
Written by Cara Esten Hustle on Fast Company.
“The same data set that could be used to build a system to prevent showing trans folks photos from before they started transition could be trivially used and weaponized by an authoritarian state to identify trans people from street cameras,” [Penelope] Phippen says.
With this dystopian future in mind, coupled with the fact that federal agencies like ICE already use facial recognition technology for immigration enforcement, do we even want machine learning to piece together a coherent identity from both pre- and post-transition images?
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With trans people facing daily harassment simply for existing as ourselves, the stakes seem too high to risk teaching these systems how to recognize us”
This made me think of Tatiana Mac’s brilliant ‘The Banal Binary’ talk at New Adventures conference two weeks ago.
Read ‘I’m a trans woman. Google Photos doesn’t know how to categorize me’ on the Fast Company site.
Tagged with: facial recognition, discrimination, systems.
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The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
Written by Kashmir Hill on New York Times.
“His tiny company, 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 Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
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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.”
Read ‘The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It’ on the New York Times site.
Tagged with: Clearview AI, facial recognition, privacy.
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These Black Women Are Fighting For Justice In A World Of Biased Algorithms
Written by Sherrell Dorsey on Essence.
“By rooting out bias in technology, these Black women engineers, professors and government experts are on the front lines of the civil rights movement of our time.”
Tagged with: algorithms, discrimination, facial recognition.
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Don’t Regulate Facial Recognition. Ban It.
Written by Evan Greer on Buzzfeed News.
“The surveillance dystopia is on the horizon, and companies like Microsoft and Amazon are helping build it. Despite their platitudes of caution and ethics, we’ve seen the consequences of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. And if we don’t stop the spread of facial recognition, its latest lucrative surveillance product, we’ll soon count our most basic freedoms among the things they’ve broken.”
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“Company after company in Silicon Valley has been pushing furiously ahead with the development of face-scanning surveillance tools. They see money to be made selling this tech to governments, airlines, and other private businesses. Facing growing concern from the public and lawmakers, the industry has disingenuously asked for “regulation.” This is straight out of Big Tech’s lobbying playbook — asking Congress to pass laws and then swooping in to help write them. By doing so, they hope to avoid the real debate: whether facial recognition surveillance should be allowed at all.”
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“There is no time to waste. Authoritarian surveillance programs are always used to target the most vulnerable and marginalized, and facial recognition enables the automation of oppression.”
Read ‘Don’t Regulate Facial Recognition. Ban It.’ on the Buzzfeed News site.
Tagged with: facial recognition, surveillance, regulation.
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The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us
Written by Rose Eveleth on Vox.
“[T]he assertion that technology companies can’t possibly be shaped or restrained with the public’s interest in mind is to argue that they are fundamentally different from any other industry. They’re not.”
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“There’s a growing chasm between how everyday users feel about the technology around them and how companies decide what to make. And yet, these companies say they have our best interests in mind. We can’t go back, they say. We can’t stop the “natural evolution of technology.” But the “natural evolution of technology” was never a thing to begin with, and it’s time to question what “progress” actually means.”
Read ‘The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us’ on the Vox site.
Tagged with: facial recognition, ethics, progress.
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‘We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology
Written by Anna Devlin on The Guardian.
“Out in the wider world, anonymity is no longer guaranteed. Facial recognition gives police and companies the means of identifying and tracking people of interest, while others are free to go about their business. The real question is: who gets that privilege?”
Tagged with: facial recognition, privacy, surveillance.
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Millions of people uploaded photos to the Ever app. Then the company used them to develop facial recognition tools.
Written by Olivia Solon and Cyrus Farivar on NBC News.
“Ever AI promises prospective military clients that it can ‘enhance surveillance capabilities’ and ‘identify and act on threats.’ It offers law enforcement the ability to identify faces in body-cam recordings or live video feeds.”
Tagged with: Ever AI, facial recognition, business models.