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Twitter AI Databases Privacy Social Networks The Internet Technology

Twitter Tells Facial Recognition Trailblazer To Stop Using Site's Photos (nytimes.com) 45

Kashmir Hill reporting for The New York Times: A mysterious company that has licensed its powerful facial recognition technology to hundreds of law enforcement agencies is facing attacks from Capitol Hill and from at least one Silicon Valley giant. Twitter sent a letter this week to the small start-up company, Clearview AI, demanding that it stop taking photos and any other data from the social media website "for any reason" and delete any data that it previously collected, a Twitter spokeswoman said. The cease-and-desist letter, sent on Tuesday, accused Clearview of violating Twitter's policies.

The New York Times reported last week that Clearview had amassed a database of more than three billion photos from social media sites -- including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Venmo -- and elsewhere on the internet. The vast database powers an app that can match people to their online photos and link back to the sites the images came from. The app is used by more than 600 law enforcement agencies, ranging from local police departments to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. Law enforcement officials told The Times that the app had helped them identify suspects in many criminal cases.
It's unclear what social media sites can do to force Clearview to remove images from its database. "In the past, companies have sued websites that scrape information, accusing them of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking law," notes the NYT. "But in September, a federal appeals court in California ruled against LinkedIn in such a case, establishing a precedent that the scraping of public data most likely doesn't violate the law."
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Twitter Tells Facial Recognition Trailblazer To Stop Using Site's Photos

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  • by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @09:15PM (#59646182)

    accounts, with fake faces and tags.

    I'm a 20-80 year old black/white/hispanic/asian with or without facial tattoos and either rich, or on public assistance.

  • Good thing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @09:23PM (#59646192) Homepage
    I'm starting to think it's a good thing I have avoided posting selfies, and that I use pictures of inanimate objects as my avatar rather than a picture of myself. Also, I avoid tagging people in photos on the rare occasions when I do post them on social media.
    • Re:Good thing (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday January 22, 2020 @09:50PM (#59646220) Homepage Journal

      All it takes is for someone to tag you in one of their photos.

      • Yep. I've never used social media and had something very strange happen to me a few years back when I was a high school teacher. My students told me they saw "the picture" of me opening my Xmas presents with a goofy grin on my face. I was completely baffled as to what they were talking about. Here to find out my father posted a picture of Xmas morning on his Facebook account and apparently tagged me in it. My father was completely puzzled as to why I asked him to remove it.
        • Got to love family on social media. Twitter could have simply kept this from being an issue for them by simply requiring everyone to sign in to view Twitter.
      • Hmm. Who'd be liable for that? The site offering the "tagging" service or the person who uploaded then "tagged" the photo of a person without their expressed consent?
      • That is why I always get out of the picture frame whenever someone takes a group photo, and I strongly say no whenever asks a photo of me. I've been doing this for the past 20 years, and I'm pretty damn sure there's no photo of me anywhere on the internet.

        Everybody's been thinking I'm paranoid for the past 20 years, but people such as you are now starting to understand and come around.

        • by radl33t ( 900691 )
          I don't understand at all. You draw more attention to yourself and are easier to profile
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 )

          That is why I always get out of the picture frame whenever someone takes a group photo, and I strongly say no whenever asks a photo of me. I've been doing this for the past 20 years, and I'm pretty damn sure there's no photo of me anywhere on the internet.

          Everybody's been thinking I'm paranoid for the past 20 years, but people such as you are now starting to understand and come around.

          Umm, yeah - you are quite paranoid. They question is why. Maybe you have a good reason, maybe you are just a bit neurotic. But paranoid, nonetheless. Have you considered that by posting here that you have a presence on the internet that can be identified?

    • The kind where a human can still tell it's you, but the pixels and contrasts and colors and details are processed so much, they are useless for any computer processing.

      Turns out processing is a limited resource. And my photos are all out! :D

  • Seems like if Twitter wants the thud the site, all they need to do is pull their access to the API.

  • I thought the title said "Tablizer" and was about to shit bricks.

    • I thought the title said "Tablizer" and was about to shit bricks.

      Kind of when I accidentally asked Satan for a puppy for Christmas and got a demon?

  • If you upload some media to Twitter and then someone else pulls it off Twitter in breach of Twitter's T&Cs then Twitter is responsible for policing that. If some thrid-party makes millions from your images without your permission then you as copyright owner have right to sue both the other party and Twitter together. Twitter making a big stand over AI and personal image abuse is PR bullshit, it's the legal team at Twitter are messing their pants that they will get sued for not clamping down on potential

    • Lol, no. I can go to twitter right now in my web browser and 'steal' twitter photos just by normal expected use - my web browser downloads them to my machine in a cache. Nobody is suing twitter for shit, you can't upload you pictures to a public venue then sue when the public accesses them.
      • by jabuzz ( 182671 )

        There is a difference between access in a profile picture in twitter or any other social media website in the normal course of using the website and downloading as many of these profile pictures as you possibly can and constructing a database from them to be used for facial recognition purposes. The former is perfectly legal, the latter is a breach of copyright. It is technically an unauthorised copy. If twitter was smart about their terms of use they would have got the users to give them permission to go a

        • You say it's a breach of copyright, but it's not, anymore than me downloading it and looking at it in my cache. If they use it and republish, that would be copyright violation.
      • by Holi ( 250190 )
        Yeah, and if you use commercially you would be just as guilty.

        Learn something about copyright before you look like a fool again.
  • I'll say it again. I want to take a picture of that face, and find the Insta of dat ass.

    I'm not saying it should exist, but if facial recognition is commonplace, it will. And if it can't find your booty pics, it can deepfake that thang.

    You all should be horrified by this.

  • We need a new law that prevents this, and make it retroactive while your at it.

    • by Holi ( 250190 )
      We actually have a law. A company cannot legally scrape images and use them for commercial gain, Without explicit permission they are violating copyright and that opens them up to all sorts of legal problems.
  • by bferrell ( 253291 ) on Thursday January 23, 2020 @01:16AM (#59646536) Homepage Journal

    It's always "the evil company"... Never "those evil programmers" doing things they SHOULD know better than to do. It doesn't matter if someone was willing to pay them to do it, or that it's "kewl". I was only doing what I was told went out with the Nuremberg trials.

    And, by and large, this is the "woke" generation at it's best.... In their cubies/at their open plan desks madly coding the weapons of over/militarized policing and then in the streets protesting that same over policing, It's like the heads of munitions manufacturing firms protesting war while selling weapons to both sides.

    • by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Thursday January 23, 2020 @06:53AM (#59646842) Homepage

      there are enough psychopaths in the world that you'll always find someone that is willing to do your evil thing.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Lots of companies have developed similar technology, including Google, and then held it back. Problem is you only need one person to skip the ethics class and it's out there.

      Anyway point is that most of the devs out there do seem to have some ethics, as the report points out. Problem is that you need to reach a critical mass of ethical developers before it becomes really effective, before it becomes very difficult to actually deploy tech like this.

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Thursday January 23, 2020 @03:22AM (#59646632)

    Look Twitter,
    YOU served those images to them, when they asked!
    YOUR servers responded to those HTTP GETs!
    So quit bitching now just because you failed at the basic laws of the information space!*

    PROTIP: Once information is public... it is public! For *everyone*. And you will never get it "back", because that is not how it works.
    PROTIP 2: Look up HTTP authentication.

    _ _ _ _
    * Then again, so does the entire media "industry". At least officially, whenever they want to steal people's money.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Holi ( 250190 )
      Then you're an idiot.
      Just because you can see a picture does not mean you have a right to use it in your commercial application.

      What Clearview has done, by scraping billions of pictures, was a wide scale rampant copyright violation.
      • Just because you can see a picture does not mean you have a right to use it in your commercial application.

        Exactly. It was publicly available for them to view it. Not for them to create a derivative work and sell it.

  • There is a bit of poetic justice in this - Twitter expecting (and demanding) a level of protection (and privacy) for Twitter content not available to it's own clients.

  • “Widespread use of your technology could facilitate dangerous behavior and could effectively destroy individuals’ ability to go about their daily lives anonymously,”

    Public anonymity is an oxymoron. You're in public, there is no right to anonymity! This is something that people who live in small towns have known for a long time.

  • I don't like what ClearView is doing, but is there a legal difference between that and what archive.org does? Maybe because ClearView then sells/profits from what it scrapes?

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein

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