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."
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."
But I went to all the trouble of setting up many (Score:3, Funny)
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.
I met a gay black latino jew girl yesterday. (Score:2)
She was a Republican.
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Good thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
All it takes is for someone to tag you in one of their photos.
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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.
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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?
I use heavily processed images. (Score:2)
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
Revoke the API Keys (Score:2)
Seems like if Twitter wants the thud the site, all they need to do is pull their access to the API.
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Why would someone scraping pictures off twitter use the API instead of the web version?
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What API, HTTP?
From Sony's twitter feed: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EO... [twimg.com]
Lexdysia (Score:1)
I thought the title said "Tablizer" and was about to shit bricks.
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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?
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Correct, the user almost always owns the copyright to their images on a website unless they're stupid enough to sign up to a site that states you handover the copyright. However by way of using a social media site you often sign up to agreements to allow the social media site to use your images for almost any purpose the site wants, barring changes and selling your images. Facebook's T&C states clearly that by signin up and uploading media, you grant FB a worldwide right to use your images for their use
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Actually Trailblazer if they are selling a software that includes a database of copyright images.
The police purchased software with stolen copyright images to identify me and I would like any information gathered from that identification to be inadmissible. I will also be filing a copyright infringement case against the company they purchased the images from and the police department. I'm sure a judge would love to hear that.
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Users retain copyright. However, Senators are conc (Score:3)
Under Twitter's terms of service, users retain copyright (if they have it).
On other hand, the press coverage has attracted the attention of a couple of Senators, who sent demands that the companies answer some questions. That'll make you pucker when your company gets those.
You misunderstand copyright... (Score:1)
Many people seem to assume copyright is an author's right. Or a right.
Copyright is a distributor's privilege.
It never existed to protect the author. Or anyone, to be frank.
Anyone using such a site should know that. And if not, hia teachers failed.
You retain nothing. You lose. Good day! ;)
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If they where to make all data private on the site then that would take care of that.
Utter PR BS! It's about being sued for copyright. (Score:2)
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
Re: Utter PR BS! It's about being sued for copyrig (Score:2)
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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
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Learn something about copyright before you look like a fool again.
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Facial recognition benefits (Score:2)
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.
Need a new law (Score:2)
We need a new law that prevents this, and make it retroactive while your at it.
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The thing that fascinates me (Score:3)
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.
Re:The thing that fascinates me (Score:4, Insightful)
there are enough psychopaths in the world that you'll always find someone that is willing to do your evil thing.
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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.
Twitter is retarded then. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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* Then again, so does the entire media "industry". At least officially, whenever they want to steal people's money.
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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.
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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.
Do you believe in kharma (Score:2)
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.
Public anonymity? (Score:1)
“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.
archive.org vs. ClearView (Score:2)
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?