Last week, the Office of the UK Information Commissioner (ICO) imposed a £ 7.5 million fine on a small technology company called Clearview AI for ‘using images of people in the UK and elsewhere collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that can be used for face recognition. ” The ICO also issued a performance notice ordering the company to stop receiving and using the personal data of UK residents that are publicly available on the internet and to delete UK residents’ data from its systems.
Because Clearview AI is not exactly a common name, some backgrounds may be useful. This is American clothing that has “scraped” (ie digitally collected) more than 20 billion images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the Internet and social media platforms around the world to create an online database. The company uses this database to provide a service that allows customers to upload an image of a person to their application, which is then checked to match all the images in the database. The application creates a list of images that have similar characteristics to the photo provided by the customer, along with a link to the websites where these images came from. Clearview describes its business as “building a secure world, one person at a time”.
The fly in the eye with this soothing ointment is that the people whose images make up the database were not informed that their photos were collected or used in this way, and they certainly never agreed to use them in this way. Hence the action of the ICO.
Most of us had never heard of Clearview until January 2021, when Kashmir Hill, a good technology journalist, revealed its existence to the New York Times. It was founded by a technology entrepreneur named Joan Ton-Ta and Richard Schwartz, who was Rudy Giuliani’s aide when he was mayor of New York and still, uh, respected. The idea was for Ton-That to oversee the creation of a powerful face recognition app, while Schwartz will use his prominent Rolodex to spark business interest.
It didn’t take Schwartz much time to realize that US law enforcement would handle this like rapacious wolves. According to Hill’s report, the Indiana Police Department was the company’s first customer. In February 2019, he resolved the case in 20 minutes. Two men fought in a park, which resulted in the other being shot in the abdomen. A passer-by recorded the crime on a smartphone, so police had a picture of the shooter’s face to view the Clearview app. I immediately got a match. The man appeared in a video that someone posted on social media and his name is included in the caption to the video. Bingo!
Schwartz realized that American law enforcement would deal with this like predatory wolves
Clearview’s marketing ad takes place in the law enforcement gallery: a two-page spread, with the left page dominated by the slogan “Stop searching. Start deciding on something that looks like Helvetica Bold with 95 points. Below is a list of annual subscription options – anything from $ 10,000 for five users to $ 250,000 for 500. But the killer blow was that there was always a trial subscription option somewhere that an individual employee could use to see if it worked. .
The basic strategy was cunning. Selling corporations as corporations from outside is difficult. But if you can get an insider, even a relatively young person, to try your stuff and find it useful, then you’re halfway to selling it. That’s how Peter Thiel got the Pentagon to buy its Palantir data analytics software. He first persuaded middle-ranking military officers to test it, knowing that they would eventually make the ground in front of their superiors from the inside. And guess what? Teal was an early investor in Clearview.
It is not clear how many customers the company has. Internal company documents leaked to BuzzFeed in 2020 suggest that so far, people connected to 2,228 law enforcement agencies, companies and institutions have created accounts and collectively conducted nearly 500,000 searches – all tracked and registered by the company. . In the United States, most institutional purchases come from local and state police departments. Overseas, leaked documents suggest that Clearview has expanded to at least 26 countries outside the United States, including the United Kingdom, where searches (perhaps unauthorized) of people in the Met, the National Crime Agency and police forces in Northamptonshire, North Yorkshire, Suffolk, Surrey and Hampshire were registered by Clearview’s servers.
In response to ICO’s fine, Clearview’s law firm said the fine was “incorrect in law” as the company no longer operates in the UK and “is not within ICO’s jurisdiction.” We’ll see about that. But what is not disputed is that many of the images in the company’s database are of social media users who are definitely in the UK and who have not given their consent. So two cheers to the ICO.
What I read
A big setback for these Ukrainian kill-switching tractors is an angry post on Corey Doctorow’s Medium blog about the power that John Deere must remotely deactivate not only tractors stolen from Russians in Ukraine but also those bought by American farmers.
Out of Control Permanent Pandemic is a sobering essay in Harper’s by Justin E. H. Smith that asks if the control legitimized by the fight against Covid will ever be eased.
Right to bear arms? In Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter on the “right to bear arms,” the historian discusses how the Second Amendment was distorted to meet the needs of the arms lobby.
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