Last week, the Office of the UK Information Commissioner (ICO) fined £ 7.5 million a small technology company called Clearview AI for “using images of people in the UK and other sites, which were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition. ”The ICO also issued a notice of execution, ordering the company to stop obtaining and using the personal data of UK residents that are publicly available on the internet and delete UK resident data from their systems.
Since Clearview AI is not exactly a household name, some background may be helpful. It is an American team that has “shaved” (that is, digitally collected) more than 20 billion images of people’s faces from publicly available information on the Internet and social networking platforms around the world. to create an online database. The company uses this database to provide a service that allows customers to upload an image of a person to their application, which is then checked to see if all the images in the database match. The app produces a list of images that have similar characteristics to the photo provided by the customer, along with a link to the websites where these images come from. Clearview describes his business as “building a safe world, one face at a time.”
The fly of this soothing ointment is that the people whose images make up the database were not informed that their photographs were being collected or used in this way and certainly never consented to their use. this way. Hence the action of the ICO.
Most of us hadn’t heard of Clearview until January 2021, when Kashmir Hill, a high-tech journalist, revealed its existence to the New York Times. It was founded by a tech businessman named Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, who had been Rudy Giuliani’s assistant when he was mayor of New York and still, um, respectable. The idea was that Ton-That would oversee the creation of a powerful facial recognition app, while Schwartz would use his bulky Rolodex to increase business interest.
It didn’t take long for Schwartz to realize that American law enforcement would do it like wolves. According to Hill’s report, the Indiana Police Department was the company’s first customer. In February 2019 he resolved a case in 20 minutes. Two men had been fighting in a park, which ended with one shot to the other in the stomach. A viewer recorded the crime on a smartphone, so police had a still image of the gunman’s face to go through the Clearview app. They immediately got a match. The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media and his name was included in a subtitle of the video clip. Bingo!
Schwartz realized that U.S. law enforcement would do it like devouring wolves
Clearview’s marketing argument played out in the law enforcement gallery: a two-page spread, with the page on the left dominated by the “Stop Searching” slogan. Start solving “in what looks like 95-point Helvetica Bold. Below would be a list of annual subscription options: from $ 10,000 for five users to $ 250,000 for 500. But the killer blow was that always there was a trial subscription option somewhere that an individual officer could use to see if it worked.
The underlying strategy was astute. Selling to corporations as corporations from the outside is difficult. But if you can get a privileged person, even a relatively junior, to try your hand at things and find them useful, then you’re halfway through the sale. This is how Peter Thiel got the Pentagon to buy the data analysis software from his company Palantir. He first persuaded middle-ranking military officers to try it, knowing that they would eventually launch their superiors from within. And guess what? Thiel was one of Clearview’s first investors.
It is unclear how many customers the company has. The company’s internal documents leaked to BuzzFeed in 2020 suggested that by then people associated with 2,228 law enforcement agencies, businesses and institutions had created accounts and collectively conducted nearly 500,000 searches, all of which were tracked and registered by the company. In the U.S., most of the institutional purchases came from local and state police departments. Abroad, leaked documents suggested that Clearview had expanded to at least 26 countries outside the U.S., including the United Kingdom, where searches (possibly unauthorized) by people at the National Crime Agency and police forces in Northamptonshire, North Yorkshire, Suffolk, Surrey and Hampshire were recorded by Clearview servers.
In response to the ICO’s fine, the law firm representing Clearview said the fine was “incorrect by law” because the company no longer does business in the UK and is not subject to the jurisdiction of the ICO “. We’ll see. But what is not discussed is that many of the images in the company’s database are from social media users who are definitely in the UK and did not give their consent. So two cheers for the ICO.
What I’ve been reading
A Big Deviation About Ukrainian Tractors with Slaughter Change is a bitter block entry in Cory Doctorow’s Medium about the power of John Deere to remotely deactivate not only the tractors stolen by the Russians in Ukraine, but also those bought by the Russians. American farmers.
Out of Control The Permanent Pandemic is an overwhelming rehearsal at Harper’s by Justin EH Smith asking if the controls legitimized by the fight against Covid will ever relax.
Right to bear arms? In Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack bulletin on the “right to bear arms,” the historian reflects on how the Second Amendment has been damaged to meet the needs of the arms lobby.