100 Billion Face Photos? Clearview AI tells investors it's On Track to Identify 'Almost Everyone in the World' (msn.com) 77
tThe Washington Post reports:
Clearview AI is telling investors it is on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure "almost everyone in the world will be identifiable," according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.
Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world. And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor "gig economy" workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar.
The 55-page "pitch deck," the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor. The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be. The company said that its "index of faces" has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month.
With $50 million from investors, the company said, it could bulk up its data collection powers to 100 billion photos, build new products, expand its international sales team and pay more toward lobbying government policymakers to "develop favorable regulation."
The article notes that major tech companies like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have all limited or ended their own sales of facial recognition technology — adding that Clearview's presentation simple describes this as a major business opportunity for themselves.
In addition, the Post reports Clearview's presentation brags "that its product is even more comprehensive than systems in use in China, because its 'facial database' is connected to 'public source metadata' and 'social linkage' information."
Those images — equivalent to 14 photos for each of the 7 billion people on Earth — would help power a surveillance system that has been used for arrests and criminal investigations by thousands of law enforcement and government agencies around the world. And the company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor "gig economy" workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar.
The 55-page "pitch deck," the contents of which have not been reported previously, reveals surprising details about how the company, whose work already is controversial, is positioning itself for a major expansion, funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor. The document was made for fundraising purposes, and it is unclear how realistic its goals might be. The company said that its "index of faces" has grown from 3 billion images to more than 10 billion since early 2020 and that its data collection system now ingests 1.5 billion images a month.
With $50 million from investors, the company said, it could bulk up its data collection powers to 100 billion photos, build new products, expand its international sales team and pay more toward lobbying government policymakers to "develop favorable regulation."
The article notes that major tech companies like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft have all limited or ended their own sales of facial recognition technology — adding that Clearview's presentation simple describes this as a major business opportunity for themselves.
In addition, the Post reports Clearview's presentation brags "that its product is even more comprehensive than systems in use in China, because its 'facial database' is connected to 'public source metadata' and 'social linkage' information."
Nuke them from space. (Score:2)
Re: Nuke them from space. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, just a few 10s of millions of GDPR requests from people in the EU and UK would be more effective.
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Work in progress. [theverge.com]
Re: Nuke them from space. (Score:2)
Also in the UK - issued a fine and told to delete all data of UK citizens. It's currently a provisional order, but hopefully it'll go through.
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-i... [ico.org.uk]
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Do they sell their services in the EU. If not they are likely not subject to EU jurisdiction at all. And, even if the EU courts tried to claim jurisdiction, (for good reason) the US has laws that limit the ability of foreign courts to enforce judgements that would be considered contrary to the first amendment in the US. I don't know if clearview AI could win under such a theory but it's not absurd.
While I'm not a fan of clearview, I think it would set a very dangerous precedent if the EU could reach into
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Note that the usual reason that companies are subject to GDPR requirements is that they actively offer services to EU residents (that means they are choosing to make themselves subject to EU jurisdiction by offering services to EU residents). Since clearview isn't setting up a webpage for EU citizens to use the jurisdiction gets alot trickier.
And, even if they do sell some products to EU governments, the EU governments have various exceptions to the GDPR type rules for security reasons, e.g., the police in
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This was my first thought as well.
The only good news here is that probably half of the photos are of social media influencers, and probably a quarter of those are of Kim Kardashian.
Re:Nuke them from space. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually good news. Now we can collectively track down people we don't like: Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, insurrectionists, racists, truckers, farmers, veterans, people that don't wear masks (celebrities at Oscars, Sporting Events or President's Birthdays excluded of course), freedom-lovers, gun owners, anyone that didn't support Black Lives Matter, capitalists, anyone that didn't vote, people that voted for the other side, science deniers, striking hospital workers, the rich, people that don't believe in climate change, people that believe in climate change but think it isn't man-made, fascists, homophobes, transphobes, people against free drug use, but also people who are addicted to drugs, misogynists, people who decorate status (but not people that pull them down) and protestors (except when we agree with it, but that gets tricky because we support citizens in India of BLM protesting government but not when other people do it).
I feel I am missing a lot here, so please feel free to fill in. I want to be sure we create a utopia where everyone is free to be who they are without fear of these undesirables with disagree with.
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That’s a pretty good list.
You add in the Stalin list. Intellectuals, academics, artists, farmers who ate their own produce, Ukrainians, Christians.
Pol pots list. Basically anyone with an IQ above 100.
In our post woke world it will include thought crimes like not affirming you child’s choice to choose their own gender (all 50 of them) (this is now a criminal offence in Victoria, Australia).
Wait till they stenograph you social media posts!
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Mod parent Funny. At least that I've stumbled over so far. The moderators are not helping. As usual. Or maybe it's just the artificial scarcity of mod points and the abundance of sock puppets hoarding them?
Hmm... Does Clearview have pictures of the sock puppets?
90 billion photos of aliens (Score:1)
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No, I would wager that most people have no idea why, which also explains why the company Clearview continues to exist in any visible form. (And I would wager even more money that several governments have nastier systems in mostly invisible forms.)
Still, not a terrible FP. And yet I'm always searching for the Funny, even in this sort of serious topic. The obvious low-hanging fruit would have been some kind of "Everything to see here" joke playing against the "Nothing to see here" defense. But in this context
How about, no (Score:2)
Re: How about, no (Score:3)
Re: How about, no (Score:1)
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Actually, they are not allowed to store on any servers without explicite permission and not only on servers in the EU, but anywhere.
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And this is where their claim falls apart. If they have scraped government sources, they might have one or two pictures of the developed and developing world, likely out of date. Otherwise they are looking at thousand
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Images freely available online are covered by both copyright law and GDPR (should they contain personal information).
When we post something on Facebook we give away certain rights to Facebook and possibly to its partners, but certainly not to any unaffiliated entity that scraps web profiles...
Freely available does not mean free use, fortunately! Clearview will need to raise a lot of funds to cover all the lawsuits it's going to face.
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Seems like a mighty big loophole just waiting to be exploited.
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Think GDPR may cause them some problems (Score:2)
Re:Think GDPR may cause them some problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. They certainly do not have my permission to store _any_ data about me and they do not have a valid business reason (for business with _me_) either.
Might also be worthwhile to investigate whether with this volume of criminal activity, they qualify as organized crime.
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Indeed. They certainly do not have my permission to store _any_ data about me and they do not have a valid business reason (for business with _me_) either.
Might also be worthwhile to investigate whether with this volume of criminal activity, they qualify as organized crime.
every login, url, link, text, transaction with a real name...is stored and accessible, but i'm not saying saying anything people don't already know. how many people here, reading this, with access to that level of data could write something cool just to build a profile on whatever they wished...that is what people are at the core of this issue are complaining about. to win that argument we will have to completely change how computers work. and i don't see that happening...
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Does not matter. You may not use personally identifiable data for anything except the original purpose it was given for and only for as long as that reason stays valid. For example, the GDPR says IP addresses in logs have to be deleted after a few weeks. Pictures on personal homepages may not be collected and stored without explicite consent. Even of that consent is given, they may not be used to identify people unless explicite consent for that use is given. And so on.
Seriously, what Clearview does is high
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all service providers are completely interconnected or becoming so. the data shared without "knowing" of it is easily accessible and they have their own graded software for that purpose that will never be sold or even seen outside of that workplace. the regulatory environment in that case, is just a matter of putting something like a picture on some aggregated user data at any point. one data point that uses your IP address might not need it log it forever but another data point can and will, while being pe
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Reminds of the whole "Sweden is not a state in the United States of America" hilarious responses that TPB gave [slashdot.org] various folks attempting to assert US law over a Swedes.
Shockingly enough, it works in reverse -- the US is not a member of the EU.
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Their whole business model is illegal.
I am not sure that ClearView works as advertised. (Score:2)
Clearview AI competitors are a bigger danger (Score:4, Insightful)
https://www.lawfareblog.com/fl... [lawfareblog.com]
The alternative is to leave this market mainly to Chinese and Russian companies. In fact, on a 2019 NIST test for one-to-one searches, Chinese and Russian companies scored higher [wired.com] than any Western competitors, occupying the top six positions. In December 2021, NIST again reported [nist.gov] that Russian and Chinese companies dominated its rankings. The top-ranked U.S. company is Clearview AI, whose business practices have been widely [techcrunch.com] sanctioned [reuters.com] in Western [priv.gc.ca] countries [innovationaus.com].
Given the network effects in this business, the United States may have permanently ceded the face recognition market to companies it can’t really trust. That’s a heavy price to pay for indulging journalists and academics eager to prematurely impose a moral framework on a developing technology.
With Clearview AI there is some hope of regulation and transparency. With Chinese or Russian software there is none.
Re:Clearview AI competitors are a bigger danger (Score:5, Insightful)
With Clearview AI there is some hope of regulation and transparency. With Chinese or Russian software there is none.
Russians and Chinese can (and will, and do) use this technology against their citizens. Their ability to use it against ours is by nature limited.
We can't protect Russian and Chinese citizens from their governments, but we in the civilized western democracies can continue to protect our citizens from them. No need to tolerate additional threats domestically in order to do that.
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Name a company you can really trust. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll wait. I don't think we need to win a race to the bottom, but everyone sure is trying.
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There are a lot more people the 7 billion (Score:2)
Don't forget those AI created. and let's not forget identity theft issues. Maybe Snowden has a comment or two on this.
How are we ok with this? (Score:3)
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This is a dictator's wet dream.
Because most people today are market morons, aka they are politically ignorant. If you are a "moderate capitalist" you don't know much about politics or the history of politics on this planet. These companies exist to keep the masses in line. That is why they exist.
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Re: How are we ok with this? (Score:2)
Not everyone, but being an outlier would be a good signal to an authoritarian government to come knocking
Booming industry (Score:2)
> could identify someone based on how they walk
Spies, crooks, and stalking victims will have to take classes at the Ministry of Silly Walks. [youtube.com]
Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just sad where technology has led us. In the early days of the Internet, it was a thrill that, with one click of a button, you could be connected to another computer in some far away part of the world. I recall thinking to myself "Wow! I just connected to a computer in Switzerland!". Fast forward to today, and the predominant use for all this innovation is for tracking and surveillance.
Who do you want to be today? (Score:2)
Welcome to the future where realistic face masks are the hot new thing. You can be Putin on the way to work and Kim Jong-un on the way home.
https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
The Robolx/Fortnite generation that is used to buying virtual items to change their looks will loves this.
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Have you made a point never to have social-butterfly friends and family members tag you in their photos?
Re: Hopefully they won't have mine... (Score:2)
And that's the fucking problem. So many idiots don't understand why I don't want them taking my photo. Half of them have auto upload to Facebookstagram enabled. The other half upload everything manually.
Tax them. (Score:2)
France has the right idea: they consider data from their population as a natural resource being exploited by corporations, and as such should be charged taxes based on the value of that information.
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Source?
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Found it (Score:3)
By luck, I was able to find it fairly quickly: This Week in Tech Episode 638 [twit.tv]; relevant portion of the discussion that I remembered:
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Fuck this world (Score:2)
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I for one feel that would be rather redundant as it feels thoroughly fucked already.
Don't get mad, get even. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Throw in some real-time tracking of their movements, Person of Interest style, and they'd be overjoyed, I'm sure.
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I would love to say that this is a brilliant idea and that we should do it. Unfortunately two wrongs do not make a right.
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You can always wait to see if they start following local laws and destroy data they collected illegally (GDPR in Europe), but that would really surprise me, since they know what they are doing is immoral, and illegal at least in Europe, and are pushing it anyways.
If they continue illegally using our personal data or trying to get as much of it as they can, I certainly would not lift a little finger or spend the least amount of energy to discourage anyone who would give them a taste of their own medicine, no
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Re: Don't get mad, get even. (Score:2)
And since you're not a friend of the government (rich person, or bringer of surveillance state technology) you will be prosecuted to 10x the fullest extents of the law to prove a point.
Shut up and comply, prole!
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If it makes the policy makers wake up and do something useful about it, I believe it actually makes a right.
Re: Don't get mad, get even. (Score:1)
We have to pay for (Score:2)
the rope to hang us with.
"funded in large part by government contracts and the taxpayers the system would be used to monitor"
Should have let Google/Amazon/etc do face rec! (Score:2)
Amazon, google and a number of other companies were much better placed to dominate this market but pressure from internal and external activists worried about privacy and racial bias pressured them to leave the market. It may have made the people who work for those firms feel better about themselves but it certainly made the world worse.
Of COURSE, someone was going to sell law enforcement facial recognition technology. The only choice we had was whether it was going to be big companies like google and ama
Who can guarantee this data is correct? (Score:2)
The Power of Narcissism (Score:2)
(Mom handing Grandma a printed photo, 1982) "Aww, look at little Johnny. This photo of him at 2 months is so cute."
(Mom sharing a Social Media post with Grandma, 2022) "Aww, look at little Johnny. This photo of him represents his introduction into the surveillance state, and his privacy gone before he even had a say."
That didn't take long...Orwell would be proud to be that scared shitless.
Scary and to be fought against! (Score:2)
As far as I can tell, people in the USA are concerned that their own government might get this power. While the rest of us are not too keen that the US Government got this or other powers, it is far more worrying that huge commercial organisations owned by the 1% might.
Basically, the whole idea needs binning. We need anonymity, not a global Big Brother. We especially don't need one that will be used by the ultra-rich to take our money and keep us in line.
Its not the number of face photos that matter (Score:1)
100 Billion photos? (Score:2)
I wonder out of the 100 billion photos, how many of them are of those who are always posting in various social media sites. Will not be surprised if the various "influencers" have over 1000 facial photos available online, each.
Or celebrities for that matter. That may run to much higher numbers for each of them.
I will be very surprised if any of my identified facial photos are anywhere in public since I have never posted a facial photo of mine, and I have specifically asked people not to tag me if they are p
So they scraped these photos from Facebook (Score:2)