US Senator Wants To Know Which Federal Authorities Are Using Clearview AI To Track the Coronavirus

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that claims to have scraped over 3 billion photos from social media to power its face-matching tool, is now facing questions from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey about recent claims that it's developing a digital contact tracing tool for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That claimed in a recent NBC interview that the company is in talks with "federal and state" authorities about developing a tool that would use facial recognition to track where a person diagnosed with COVID-19 has traveled and whom they may have come in contact with. Clearview has not identified any of these authorities nor the length of the agreements or contracts it has signed or is seeking. It's also unclear how Clearview's facial recognition tools would aid in contact tracing efforts or how the company would obtain pictures of people diagnosed with the disease and track their movements at scale.

In a letter to Ton-That, Markey asked Clearview to name the government agencies it claims to be communicating with and to disclose any agreements it may have reached with them. He also asked if Clearview is planning to use real-time facial recognition to power its contact tracing tool. BuzzFeed News previously reported that Clearview had developed a sister company called Insight Camera that partnered with at least two organizations to do real-time facial recognition and surveillance. In response to a detailed list of questions, Ton-That told BuzzFeed News: "We just received the letter from Senator Markey, for whom we have great respect. We will be responding to him directly." Asked by BuzzFeed News, Ton-That did not comment on which state or federal authorities the company is working with. "Technology has an important role to play in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic, but this health crisis cannot justify using unreliable surveillance tools that could undermine our privacy rights," the letter reads. "Given that your responses to my previous letter failed to address ongoing concerns about your product -- particularly around accuracy and bias testing -- any plans to deploy it widely to fight the coronavirus could further increase Clearview's threat to the public's privacy."

Re:

[kwelch007]

(TrueScore: 4, Correct)

If I showed these points to somebody from the year 1999, they probably wouldn't believe me...

• * I heard of this Mastodon decentralized network. Then I read this on their website: "We only list servers that are committed to active moderation against racism, sexism and transphobia." It never ceases to baffle me how the few "decentralized" services that exist all seem to explicitly demand the exact same kind of tyranny which was the purpose of decentralizing in the first place... .
• * If you use Tor, just forget about doing anything whatsoever (outside of .onion sites). Even paid VPNs and proxies are seen as a cancer to exterminate by site owners. .
• * On Whitepages (.com), no matter what absurd, obviously fake and impossible names you enter, it will always say: "We found Slasdotexamplefakename on Whitepages Premium", in an attempt to trick you into paying them money because the "person" you were looking for supposedly exists behind their paywall. This scam is somehow allowed to keep operating, just like countless other major/semi-governmental sites which get away with absolutely anything. I've pointed this "bug" out to the owners multiple times but they of course just ignore my e-mails. .
• * As with countless other "decentralized" things, I looked into The Federation / Fediverse. From their site: "we expect sites we list to have a humane code of conduct in place. Should sites who fail to ban content that can be found generally harmful, that node will be blocked from listing here." That makes no sense grammatically, but it continues: "Harmful content can be, but not limited to, malware, graphical material of minors, abusive images, hateful content, racist content and climate denialism." In other words, the whole thing is controlled by the exact same truth-suffocating, hateful scumbags as the centralized giants, rendering it utterly pointless. .
• * To my horror, I discovered one day in 2019 that "anonymous" posting has been disabled on Slashdot. (As if the constant insult of being called a "coward" wasn't already bad enough...) Registering an account involves a massive form of information, e-mail verification with an annoying forced "password reset", and of course a Google reCANCER blob. In other words, it's no longer possible to properly comment on articles. It was the last place where I could in any way make my little voice heard to a couple of other people. .
• * Half the time, those Google reCAPTCHA puzzles never end. They just keep showing more and more new stupid "challenges" for me to sit there like a monkey and click, click and click until the end of time or I eventually give up, kill the tab and forget about doing any of the basic tasks that no longer can be done in the dystopian surveillance nightmare that the Internet has turned into. .
• * I tried to use Discord, so I went to their site and clicked "in browser". They first make you "accept" some EULA and then (of course) force you to play the Google reCANCER game, but even after doing so, they immediately just dump you to a static webpage saying that they have "detected unusual activity" and "need you to verify with phone". Die slowly in a fire. .
• * Did you know that there is an increasing number of people livestreaming their front porch 24/7, car or workplace on Twitch and other similar sites for anyone to watch and record? I don't doubt for a second that it's legal, since evil, mentally ill psychopaths are in charge of the law, but they definitely don't have my permission to video/audio record me walking by their house, buying something in their store, riding in their car, going anywhere near them, etc. .
• * The entire point of reCAPTCHA is to verify that you are human, right? Well, think again! This nonsense is what I now sometimes get instead of the "human challenge": "Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. For more details visit our help page"... Amazing. .
• * The fraudsters at Stripe made me waste countless months learning and implementing their massive API only to one day, out of the blue as I was asking them a technical question, tell me something along the lines of: "Unfortunately, we won't be able to provide services for you going forward." Naturally, I asked them what they meant, but (as always is the case with these companies) they just did not reply at all. My only guess is that it had something to do with me also allowing Bitcoin payments for the service I was building, and this was considered a "risk" to them, or something. I had zero complaints/conflicts for any of the charges I had made in the past through them, so it was definitely not due to some actual abuse by me or my account. At any given moment, they can just cut you off without telling you why, and then you're forever unable to charge people money online in practice. (All of their competitors are even more sketchy and virtually nobody uses Bitcoin, sadly.) .
• * I had finally found one single source on the known Internet providing a certain bit of data, and set up my cURL bot to fetch it daily. It was not long before the requests started failing. Looking into it, I realized that they had just switched to the dreaded CloudFlare "Cybermafia Protection Services", meaning both my normal browser and my bots were presented with this "anti-bot" screen which obviously stops the cURL bot, but also I, as a human, with a full-fledged, JavaScript-enabled browser, still had to play their tiresome, endless "monkey-solve-puzzle" game where I'm forced to help Satan/Google train their spy AI, collecting data about me with every single pixel my cursor moves. .
• * In early 2020, I tried to visit a US newspaper's website. This is the message that was dumped on me: "We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time." .
• * My ancient Hotmail e-mail account, created in the late 1990s and mostly kept around for nostalgic reasons, has not allowed me to log into it for ages. It's frozen at the "verify with phone" screen, which is impossible to get past. The account was like 15 years old when they suddenly decided they need to "verify" it "for my protection", forever locking me out from it. .

If you're going to reply with "it works for me! You're doing it wrong...", then please understand that they don't harass people who they already have fully tracked. For example, if you use malicious spyware such as Google's Chrome "browser", or use your residential/"real" IP address, all is already lost from the beginning.

And yet, you're probably the guy who sued McDonald's because their coffee was "too hot."

If you don't like it, don't use it. I don't care. But get used to the fact that no service is truly free...whoever provides has some cost somewhere, and these days more and more potential liability.

Facial recognition

[PPH]

Everyone wearing masks. Let's think about that for a moment.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

If they start telling everyone they have to wear a facemask that has their actual face printed on it or be arrested, then we'll know we're near the end.

Re: Facial recognition

[Reverend Green]

Wearing your Corona muzzle reminds you that you have no rights. That's important! The loss of accuracy on the facial recognition spycams is more than offset by covidiots' eager embrace of "contact tracing" total surveillance.

Thanks for playing. You lose, we win. Also, you lose. And we win. Fuck you prole that's why! Thank you please drive thru.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

Uh, hate to ruin your Grand Conspiracy Theory(s) but this ain't gonna last forever, old son, things will eventually go back to normal, and normal ain't gonna include wearing a damn surgical mask over your face all day every day. Doesn't even mean that now.

Re: Facial recognition

[Reverend Green]

"this ain't gonna last forever"

I thank God every day that America has a tradition of free speech and an armed populace.

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

He thinks I talk like that all the time, LOL!

Figured I talk to you in your own colloquial dialect, you might feel more at home that way.

Re: Facial recognition

[Reverend Green]

The thing is - if you can put aside your smug classist sneering for a moment - you have no actual reason to believe the dictatorships, mass house arrest, unconscionable social isolation decrees, and related crimes against humanity will be temporary.

The current state of the world is unprecedented. Despite the weak and insincere efforts of astroturfers to pretend the same thing was done during past sicknesses, no one is fooled. No such thing was done. Never before have governments across the Western world inc

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

Blah blah blah WORDS

Keep trying to spread that FUD, old son, we all know there's all sorts of gullible people on the internets. xD

Re: Facial recognition

[Reverend Green]

So what you're saying is, you have no counter-argument, no actual reason to expect the Covid Rouge's "temporary" crimes against humanity will actually be temporary. However you have chosen to bury your head in the sand and sing "la la la!" in hopes this inconvenient reality just disappears.

C'mon my brother - I've read your posts for a long time - you're an asshole for sure, but I don't believe you're an apologist for totalitarianism. Stand up against the Covid Rouge. Stand up for freedom. Stand up for commo

Re:

[Rick Schumann]

LOL no what I'm saying is your'e not worth the time and effort for any sort of 'counter argument' because you're either a garden-variety internet troll, therefore I'm not feeding you or giving you fap material, or you're just a total wing-nut and again arren't worth the time and effort put into any sort of 'reasoning' because your miswired brain won't get it anyway.
So far as me being an 'assohole' goes: you get what you give, and the internets have made me into what I am on the internets; you're a dickhea

Re: Facial recognition

[Reverend Green]

Calm down and collect yourself.

Then once your mind is clear, stand up for America.

Remember what President Kennedy said? Now is the time for good men to come to the aid of their country. America needs good men who stand strong against tyranny. Be one.

Re:

[HiThere]

IIUC, there's a company in China that claims exactly that, and works with the government. How accurate it is I don't know. But think about it a bit.

Chinese faces ARE more similar than western faces, because there are fewer "small group" gene-pools mixed in recently. If it can tell Chinese faces apart....

OTOH, I once discovered that a motorcycle I bought only had seven different key patterns to the entire model line. So perhaps lots of collisions are acceptable.

Re:

[retchdog]

eh, false arrests and detentions are also much more acceptable in China too, so it cuts both ways.

Re: Facial recognition

[Reverend Green]

Big Brother knows every move you make, every word you say. Know when you take a shit. Even if you're wearing your Corona muzzle.

Welcome to Soviet America, comrade citizen peon. Please drive thru!

Re:

[PPH]

every move you make,
every word you say.
Know when you take a shit.

I think you mis-remembered the lyrics to that song.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Aighearach]

I wanted a sci-fi dystopia and all I got was this lowbrow sitcom.

Re:

[sysrammer]

Ha! I was going to comment then saw that your post said all that needs to be said.

Re: Facial Recognition Tech is IMMENSELY BENEFICIA

[Reverend Green]

It's dystopic AND tediously unfunny!!

surveillance

[e**(i pi)-1]

I start to believe that this is just a pretend for ease the use of more surveillance technology in the future. The current crisis is an opportunity to implement such technology routinely. If you think about any of the suggestions a little bit with common sense, they are not going to work. Maybe very severe measures like non-removable ankle monitors allow to track people reliably. Apps or face recognition, well, let them try. I'm not worried, except of course if a government would start to turn fascist.

Re:

[sysrammer]

I start to believe that this is just a pretend for ease the use of more surveillance technology in the future. The current crisis is an opportunity to implement such technology routinely.

Agreed.

Apps or face recognition, well, let them try. I'm not worried, except of course if a government would start to turn fascist.

Or Communist, for that matter. They are using that kind of thing in China, which is difficult because they all look the same.

The phantom menace

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It's an emergency! Let's build key piecesnof a techmological panopticon!

"So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause!" -- Padme

History and the collapse of democracies aren't about giving a creepy guy such power. You don't do that. It's the people you cheer whom you give that power.