Facial Recognition

It’s a beautiful sunny day and you are walking down the street. You notice a strange man with a camera peeking his head out of the driver’s side window of his car. Click, he just took your picture. You’re thinking, ‘What is he doing?’ He’s thinking ‘Now I know her name, her street address and other identifying information that could lead me right to her front door.

Gasp.

This is the capability of Clearview AI, a new facial recognition software with a database that includes upwards of 3 billion images taken from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and other online sources.

With most people’s internet cache of photos attached to their names, things like finding peoples addresses, where they work and where people can be found daily will be easy for the potentially nefarious, in addition to law enforcement who are currently using this software to help solve crimes.

While the attainment of these images are not technically considered illegal, this is a new frontier, and the legalities are far from being settled.Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, works with local grassroots organizations to pass bans on the government’s use of facial recognition programs.

“What Clearview AI has done is fundamentally shaken up people’s trust in the internet,” Maass said. “People initially gravitated to the internet out of wanting to socialize and express themselves, and what Clearview has done is broken that trust by using those images against people.”

Clearview, by creating a dataset that allows people to be identified in a variety of situations, has shared its software with law enforcement and other private entities, but the dataset has yet to be released publicly.

Maass believes it’s just a matter of time before this could become a reality.

In addition, it can be incredibly difficult to regulate the private sector’s use of face recognition. San Francisco, Berkley, and Oakland have existing bans on facial recognition in place, and the state of California currently has a three-year moratorium on body-worn cameras used for such purposes.

“There are many ethical issues, and facial recognition is a net negative for society,” Maass said. “Clearview is sure to face a lot of problems in the near future both potentially legally and as a business model.”

Law enforcement, in defense of its use of Clearview, claims the software is limited to law enforcement uses, but the probability of this software becoming a public offering and moving into commercial products is of grave concern for many.

Today, we are living in a society where surveillance to track people is very real.

“Law enforcement should be equally as concerned as citizens are, because facial recognition also has the ability to reveal the identity of undercover officers,” Maass said. “If people who are championing this technology actually started thinking about the implications of it in an in-depth way they might become alarmed.”

If everyone has access to facial recognition, this could be a huge problem. Domestic abusers and criminals would also potentially have access to people’s identifying information which could put people in danger.

The state of Illinois has successfully implemented legislation with its Biometric Information Privacy act. The state law imposes requirements on businesses that collect or otherwise obtain biometric information, including fingerprints, retina scans and facial geometry scans, which could include identifying individuals through photographs.

Maybe Nevada should follow suit.