The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: Bigburgh
AugustusMasonicus and DBCowboy, I Google'd your screen names and mine a few times. Was shocked to see ALL the photo's and other content that's come up.

No pics of me when I looked, however this weirdo came up under my name when I searched:

OMG!!!🤣😂😂😂😆😆😆

Well, good thing I haven't posted images of myself on the internet pretty much ever.. so as long as I wear a hoodie then I should be blind to big brother's eyes.

a reply to: eXia7

I never posted an image of myself on the Internet, but there are at least two photos in which I appear that were posted by someone else.

The fact that we do not do it doesn't mean we cannot appear in a photo taken and posted by another person.

a reply to: MichiganSwampBuck
Very true. China has been running this system for a number of years so it aint new. The China system monitors the populous and gives or takes away points for everyday living. More points credit rating drops, you have your face publicised for minor infraction like jay walking, littering etc. etc.
When you reach a certain level of points you are forcibly removed from your home and have to live in a lower class neighbourhood.
There's a video of the Chinese system and the punishments. Please go look for it and see what will happen. Notice I said what will happen not what might happen.

Hi-tech in wrong hands lead to open-air prisons and state terrorism against countrys own citizen. face recognition is one part , machines monitor what we all do in internet , intelligence agencies scan posts and use algorithms searching linguistic markers.


Paranoid Ai is reading your mind and migh get you flagged


www.theguardian.com...

Hmm...i think i been followed...he look`s like this :

Follower

a reply to: ArMaP

SO okay, I know this won't be a popular question for me to ask, but if I want to download this app to keep tabs on any of my ex's … how can I do that? Is their product on the open market yet?

Edit #2 -- okay, sorry, that sounded creepy. I have some stalker ex's though, and I want to make sure they keep living far away from where I live. THERE … that is the rough truth. Ugh.

a reply to: Fowlerstoad

From what I read I got the impression that they do not sell their service to private persons, only to security related companies, but I may be wrong and they may sell it to anyone that wants to spend 10,000 dollars a year.

a reply to: ArMaP

$10,000 a year certainly puts me out of their customer base. Bummer.

So: Facial ID only for the rich?

a reply to: DBCowboy

No rights are guaranteed bud . You may think they are . The minute the government wants to take them away is they day their guarantee ends .

a reply to: hounddoghowlie

You’re all for giving your rights away , don’t give mine away too please

originally posted by: dfnj2015
a reply to: ArMaP

It's too bad the corporations are so powerful in this country. It would be nice if we had privacy laws like Europe.

Corporations ARE the government.

I’ll try and remember that next time I read a story about cctv watching parents to make sure their kids eat their broccoli and do their ( common core ) homework.

originally posted by: ArMaP
The thread's title is the exact title of the article I just read on the New York Times site. The source may be considered biased by some, but I think the information in it is important enough to be shared on a conspiracy related site like ATS.

This is about a software created by a new company, Clearview AI, that makes face recognition easier because it has database of (according to them) 3 billion images (or, for the non-American, 3 thousand millions). How did they got all those images?

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.

At first they couldn't find a target market, but they finally decided to sell it to law enforcement agencies.

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

The first steps taken by Kashmir Hill, the reporter who wrote the article, resulted in a dead end.

When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.
While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it. And he said my photo had rung alarm bells because the app “flags possible anomalous search behavior” in order to prevent users from conducting what it deemed “inappropriate searches.”

It was a small start-up, looking for clients, so how did they grow up?

In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
Another early investor is a small firm called Kirenaga Partners. Its founder, David Scalzo, dismissed concerns about Clearview making the internet searchable by face, saying it’s a valuable crime-solving tool.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.

...

By the end of 2017, the company had a formidable facial recognition tool, which it called Smartcheckr. But Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That weren’t sure whom they were going to sell it to.

...

The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners. Among other things, Mr. Thiel was famous for secretly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted the popular website Gawker. Both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Ton-That had been the subject of negative articles by Gawker.

“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”

But success is not only made from having funding, the product must work, and, apparently, it works as advertised.

In February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting with Clearview. They solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app. Two men had gotten into a fight in a park, and it ended when one shot the other in the stomach. A bystander recorded the crime on a phone, so the police had a still of the gunman’s face to run through Clearview’s 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 caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,” said Chuck Cohen, an Indiana State Police captain at the time.

...

In July, a detective in Clifton, N.J., urged his captain in an email to buy the software because it was “able to identify a suspect in a matter of seconds.” During the department’s free trial, Clearview had identified shoplifters, an Apple Store thief and a good Samaritan who had punched out a man threatening people with a knife.

...

According to a Clearview sales presentation reviewed by The Times, the app helped identify a range of individuals: a person who was accused of sexually abusing a child whose face appeared in the mirror of someone’s else gym photo; the person behind a string of mailbox thefts in Atlanta; a John Doe found dead on an Alabama sidewalk; and suspects in multiple identity-fraud cases at banks.

(end of Part I)

Good thread. This is one matter that many people in the know have been aware of and dreaded. It has to be controlled and placed in the right hands immediately.

a reply to: ArMaP

This is about a software created by a new company, Clearview AI, that makes face recognition easier because it has database of (according to them) 3 billion images (or, for the non-American, 3 thousand millions). How did they got all those images?

CNET had a pretty good, condensed but accurate version of the story out to all of the people on their email list this morning.


Clearview AI - Privacy is dead!

This is all well and good (actually its not, its evil and horrible, but so goes the saying), but like any technology based tool, it has its flaws. Anyone wanting to defeat this simply needs to create several profiles on the social media giants, and upload 1000's of random images tagging it with whatever name they want to distort. For instance, there are maybe 3-4 images of me online so if I were to upload say 10,000 images of static and give the file my name, put my name in the metadata, and then 'tag' myself in the static images.... the AI wouldn't be able to do anything. A state actor or agent may even use ready made bot software to do the work, constantly spamming out millions of images per hour.

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: eXia7
The fact that we do not do it doesn't mean we cannot appear in a photo taken and posted by another person.

Or have our face picked up by a traffic cam or the multitudes of security cameras that are multiplying everywhere.

originally posted by: TrulyColorBlind

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: eXia7
The fact that we do not do it doesn't mean we cannot appear in a photo taken and posted by another person.

Or have our face picked up by a traffic cam or the multitudes of security cameras that are multiplying everywhere.

Supermarkets and the like probably sell off user data like flybys and other reward type offers as well as the security footage and timestamps.

a reply to: TrulyColorBlind

This specific company is using stuff scraped from social media (IE: Publicly available images), at least according to the post. It's based on the billions of pictures the idiots love uploading of themselves everyday. With a private company (traffic cams and security cams) you would expect some level of privacy... or at least you should be able to.

The 'trick' to this AI working is that these images also contain self identifying information (IE: Tag your friend (or yourself!)) Pictures taken purely in public have a much higher degree of uncertainty in accurate identification of any given subject without that identifying information being present. Traffic cams are an interesting case. It can be argued you can be identified by the license plate... but that would have to be corroborated through DMV records (photo ID) or another means, as people often share/loan vehicles.

For an absolute match, you would need both the photo and positive ID at the time of the photo. Think ATM machine. And again, there is a certain expectation of privacy with private companies. Not to say that can't (or isn't) being shared, but the database for this type of information is much smaller and not without it's own issues. The smaller the dataset, the more chance for errors.

A government, for instance, has both the means and motivation to link all these records together but for the time being this stuff is mostly limited to the weirdos who want to post every single thing they do online with a big old neon tag saying "hey, look at me!"

originally posted by: DBCowboy
a reply to: ArMaP

4th Amendment
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

5th Amendment
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

14th Amendment
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.


----------------------------------------------


I posted (what I think)are applicable sections of the Bill of Rights pertaining to privacy, due process

I would be surprised if this isn't fought in the Supreme Court.

I have no problem providing tools, supporting tools to enable law enforcement to do their job. But everyone has rights, and those rights are guaranteed.

People are innocent until PROVEN guilty in a court of law. I think this violates privacy.

you make valid points and normally I would agree with your post .

but there is one factor that you overlooked and sadly negates all this .
its the social media narcissism "dont think consequences effect me" people today.

its the "gotta post every part of my life" and also "we demand to see every part of XX hollywood person/ person we hate/love" .

the one puts pictures out in the public domain and the other demands that anyone in public has no expectancy of privacy.
hence we love to show pics of ourselves and demand if your in public you can take their pictures/video.

well now it comes back to bite you in the butt BIG TIME.

once you WILLINGLY remove your right to privacy (out in public pics ok) and you post your entire life on social media and internet then you cant claim now when someone takes advantage of your narcissism they cant do that.

along with the reason (at least at this time) is catching criminals.

this reminds me of a warning my computer teacher back in the pre internet days of BBS systems gave me

DONT PUT ANYTHING ON THE COMPUTER (later class updated internet) THAT YOU WOULD NOT PUT ON THE FRONT PAGE (of newspaper) OR BILLBOARD (yes I am showing my age) .

Scrounger

originally posted by: eXia7
Well, good thing I haven't posted images of myself on the internet pretty much ever.. so as long as I wear a hoodie then I should be blind to big brother's eyes.

If only it was that easy. It's not just facial recognition. Software has been developed, or is in development that can identify you by the way you move. To the naked eye you and I may appear to walk identically to each other, but we don't.

There are tonnes of ways to identify a person, and the big brother types are covering them all. Your hoodie won't do jack to protect you when the time comes.

Back on the main topic though. This kind of thing should surprise no one. I mean to lose your privacy you have to have had it to begin with, and since I began using the internet all the years since it became public, I noticed citizens of the United States for example have basically no privacy.

So many 'people search' sites out there where I can find out your entire credit history, criminal records, utility bills, where you went to school, where you have worked, properties you own, names of your kids, spouses and family members etc. etc. just from having your name or email all for a small fee.

For a few bucks I have your entire life in my hand if you're in the U.S..... So again what privacy?

I myself had some guy in the U.S being a complete ass to me over a woman I was dating at the time, dude was being a psycho.

Within a couple of hours I was telling him who his kids were, the addresses of the properties he owned, the various businesses he worked at across the U.S including a military base and the role he worked in pretty much everything about him all the way back to the time he left home as a young adult.

And I didn't even pay a single penny. Just a couple of emails and his name and google. And I got everything.
Simply because he was playing these "I know everything about you" games. So I decided to show him he knew nothing about me as I'm not American, and that he being American he couldn't hide if he wanted to.

He backed off pretty quickly after that.

So again what privacy? I'm just an average Joe with some IT skills, not that I needed them as even a low IQ hillbilly can do what I did and has been able to for decades now.

Big Brother/Minority Report is here and it is just going to get worse. We could put the Genie back in the bottle, but I can tell you now nobody will.
People will as they do with everything do nothing but bitch and complain impotently online and little else. That's why.

People cried over such privacy matters as the ones I discussed 10 years ago. But looky looky, they still exist and have gotten worse.

It will be the same with this. People will make some noise. Cry about their freedoms and privacy and how dare they steal your pics, just as they cry and whine about facebook selling their data while they still use the platform, and 20 years from now everyone will be cool with face tracking and having zero privacy.

It will become the norm, a part of daily life thanks to the human mentality of 'what's the use?, no point fighting it' and it just being a part of life for the younger ones raised with it.

So before you all go off on tirades like "ERMAHGHERD!!! MAH FREEDOMS!" and such. Please be sure to have solutions before you open your traps.

If you have a problem with this tech what are YOU going to do about it?

My money is on jack and sh*t. Just like with almost every topic on this site.


"Wah politicians suck! Let me re-elect them over and over!"
"Wah facebook sucks! I am gonna keep using it!"
"Wah youtube is deleting mah vidyas! let me upload some more!!!"

We're our own worst enemies. Because we don't just let this sh*t happen to us, we bend over and say "please come on in and shaft me harder!"

This facial recognition tech is not the problem, it's been in the news for decades that companies are trying to make this stuff. It's the lack of doing anything to fix the issue that is the problem. That you will all expect that someone else will come along and fix it all for you.

Oh well see you at the RFID chipping booth in 10 years from now.
We can complain about how we elected the people chipping us while we queue up......

a reply to: AtomicKangaroo

If only it was that easy. It's not just facial recognition. Software has been developed, or is in development that can identify you by the way you move. To the naked eye you and I may appear to walk identically to each other, but we don't. There are tonnes of ways to identify a person, and the big brother types are covering them all. Your hoodie won't do jack to protect you when the time comes.

great.dance...