facial recognition

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Someone Stole Clearview AI’s List of Clients

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Clearview AI gained notoriety for partnering with law enforcement on facial recognition, using its database of billions of scraped images from the web. But someone just stole its list of clients.

…Clearview AI disclosed to its customers that an intruder “gained unauthorized access” to its list of customers, to the number of user accounts those customers had set up, and to the number of searches its customers have conducted. The notification said the company’s servers were not breached and that there was “no compromise of Clearview’s systems or network.”

Meanwhile, law enforcement on end-to-end encryption: “Who needs that kind of encryption, other than maybe the military? We don’t even — in law enforcement — use encryption like that.”

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Clearview AI Helps Law Enforcement With Facial Recognition

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

In a long read from NYT, Kashmir Hill writes about a startup called Clearview AI that works with law enforcement on facial recognition.

You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

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Students Want to Ban College Facial Recogntion

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Students for Sensible Drug Policy and Fight for the Future are teaming up to ban college facial recognition from campuses.

Facial recognition surveillance spreading to college campuses would put students, faculty, and community members at risk…Schools that are already using this technology are conducting unethical experiments on their students. Students and staff have a right to know if their administrations are planning to implement biometric surveillance on campus. Grassroots organizing stopped facial recognition from ruining music festivals. Now we’re going to stop it from invading university campuses.

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Homeland Security Cancels Facial Recognition Plan for Americans

Andrew Orr · · 1 Comment

Homeland Security had a plan to expand its use of airport facial recognition to include U.S. citizens. After much outcry the agency will drop that plan, although foreign nationals and visitors will still face mandatory scanning.

A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection, which filed the proposal, said the agency has “no current plans to require U.S. citizens to provide photographs upon entry and exit from the United States,” and that it “intends to have the planned regulatory action regarding U.S. citizens removed from the unified agenda next time it is published.”

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Like an Addict Facebook is Chasing Even More of Our Data, Now With Facial Scans

Andrew Orr · · 4 Comments

Researcher Jane Manchun Wong found that Facebook is working on facial scans called “facial recognition-based identity verification.” It would ask users to upload a selfie of them looking in different directions before they can access their account.

On that same screen and later in the actual video selfie process, Facebook notes that “no one else will see” the video selfie you submit to them and says the video will be “deleted 30 days after your identity is confirmed.”

Deleted after 30 days. Based on Facebook’s past actions we can safely assume it will do the exact opposite. There’s not much room for giving them the benefit of the doubt.

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Australia, Please Don't Scan My Face When I Download Porn

Andrew Orr · · 1 Comment

The U.K. recently canceled its plans for an age filter on porn websites, but now Australia has taken up the mantle. It wants internet users to verify their identity using facial recognition before viewing pornography.

Writing in a submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs’ inquiry, launched in September, Home Affairs said it could provide a “suite of identity-matching services”.

One example highlighted by the department was the use of the Face Verification Service to prevent a child using their parent’s driver licence to get around any age verification.

At this point, me writing about porn is a running joke now. But stuff like this raises awareness on important privacy issues.

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Your Kids' Photos Power Surveillance Technology

Andrew Orr · · 1 Comment

The New York Times has a nice feature out today about how a mother found photos of her kids in a machine learning database.

None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace. Containing the likenesses of nearly 700,000 individuals, it has been downloaded by dozens of companies to train a new generation of face-identification algorithms, used to track protesters, surveil terrorists, spot problem gamblers and spy on the public at large. The average age of the people in the database, its creators have said, is 16.

I can’t imagine the gross feeling you get when you see your kids in a database like this.

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Your Facial Data is Worth a $5 Gift Card to Google

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Google employees are stopping people in public and offering them a US$5 gift card in exchange for their facial data. The company is thought to be working on a Face ID authentication system for the Pixel 4.

“I assume they’ll use the data to train a neural network to be able to recognize what a face is,” he replied. “Then you train your own phone on what your specific face looks like. And that’s what gets used to unlock your phone, Face ID-style, but more accurately.”

Add three zeroes to that Google, and then I’ll discuss it.