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The privacy paranoid among us have long worried that all of our online photos would be scraped to create a universal face recognition app. My friends, it happened and it’s here: nytimes.com/2020/01/18/techn…
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I'm not sure which is scarier/more desirable. An app that puts a name to a face in seconds, or an app that shows you all the online photos of you that you didn't realize were there. This app does both, but only law enforcement has access to it, for now.
When I first started looking into Clearview AI, it had a nonexistent office address on its website & one fake employee on LinkedIn, and no one from company would return my calls. But they knew about me and were monitoring for cops who uploaded my photo to their app.
When @Aaron_Krolik did a forensic analysis of the app, he discovered code to pair it with augmented reality glasses, so you could theoretically identify people in real time walking down the street. Yeah, like in Terminator 2.
Clearview says 600 law enforcement agencies are using its app. Detectives tell me it's amazing. When the founder took a photo of me while I covered my nose & mouth, it still worked, returning 7 photos of me, one 10 years old. It's insane. Read the story: nytimes.com/2020/01/18/techn…
Oh also, a note on the top art by @adamferriss, he used computer-generated faces from thispersondoesnotexist.com. When I interviewed the company founder, he pulled up the same site, ran the recognition app on some of the faces. There were no matches. The friggin' thing really works.
Jan 18, 2020 · 2:37 PM UTC
