A secretive facial recognition program
“could herald the end of public anonym-
ity,” said Kashmir Hill in The New York
Times. While police departments have used
facial recognition tools for years, they’ve
been limited to searching government-
provided images, such as mug shots and
driver’s license photos. Now an app called
Clearview AI can scrape images of faces
“from across the internet”—including so-
cial media sites like Facebook and Twitter,
employment sites, even Venmo—amassing
a database of more than 3 billion photos.
“Until now, technology that readily identi-
fies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of
its radical erosion of privacy.” Clearview licenses its technology to
more than 600 law enforcement agencies. New York City passed
on the app after a 90-day test, worried about potential abuse, but
some officers reportedly kept accounts and continue to use it on
their own. Clearview’s investors “predict that its app will eventu-
ally be available to the public.” Soon, “searching someone by face
could become as easy as Googling a name.”We’ve been building toward this moment for a long time, said
Adrian Chen in The California Sunday Magazine. In the late
1800s, the French police officer Alphonse Bertillon devised the
first “method for identifying criminals based on their physical
features,” using 11 physical measurements. But scale changeseverything. The Department of Homeland
Security plans to scan “97 percent of all pas-
sengers on outbound international flights.”
And the technology has been improved and
commercialized to the point where you can
search a database and buy scans for as little
as “40 cents an image if you opt for Ama-
zon’s facial recognition software plan.”All this has already led to growing fears about
facial recognition, said Janosch Delcker and
Cristiano Lima in Politico.com, but “efforts to
check its spread are hitting a wall of resistance
on both sides of the Atlantic.” A bipartisan
push to limit the government’s use of facial recognition has stalled
in Congress. The EU is discussing a five-year temporary ban, but
European privacy rules contain “a broad carve-out for public
authorities.” And authorities are using it: London’s police just last
week enabled live facial recognition for cameras across the city.Even if some bans on the technology succeed, said Bruce Schneier
in The New York Times, we’re still building a “surveillance so-
ciety.” Facial recognition is just one identification technology
among many. An entirely unregulated data industry is already
creating “profiles about who we are and what our interests are”
by tracking our movements, purchases, and interactions. “We are
being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society
needs rules about when that is permissible.”Surveillance: Your face is now public property
Amr^ A
lfiky/The^New^ YorkTimes/Redux,^ AlamyFringe videos thrive on Amazon
More than two-thirds of the 65,000 titles
on Amazon’s Prime Video service are user-
uploaded, said Erich Schwartzel in The Wall
Street Journal, giving “amateur how-to’s and
conspiracy theories a stage.” The film Dreams
From My Real Father, “which falsely reports
that Barack Obama’s biological father was
a Communist Party member and his grand-
father was a CIA agent, ranked No. 8 among
the most-reviewed features in the Special
Interest category” on Amazon’s site. Another
documentary “argues that the Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh may have been
persuaded to blow up the federal building
through government-sponsored mind con-
trol.” Unlike Netflix and Hulu, Amazon offers
a self-upload feature “through an automatic
system without first negotiating licensing deals
with studios and other major companies.”Payback for getting kicked off Facebook
Tech executives are increasingly falling victim
to “swatting,” said Sheera Frenkel in The
New York Times—fraudulent calls to police
designed to send a SWAT team to a person’s
home. It happened in November to Insta-
gram CEO Adam Mosseri after police in San
Francisco received “a series of telephone callsclaiming that hostages were being held” inside
Mosseri’s home. After a prolonged standoff,
“they realized the calls were hoaxes.” Would-
be swatters “have been aided by forums”
that publish the names and addresses of
high- ranking executives at tech companies
such as Facebook. The social media company
has cracked down on accounts that violate
its rules, leading to what police believe to be
“retaliatory attacks against the executives
responsible.”Tinder wants to know you’re for real
Tinder unveiled a series of new safety features,
including a photo verification system and a
“panic button,” said Ashley Carman in The
Verge.com. The popular dating site will now
ask users to send in a selfie for verification to
receive a blue checkmark, the same perk that
Twitter gives to many journalists and public
figures. Checkmarks are “meant to give poten-
tial matches peace of mind that they won’t be
catfished”—that is, lured into a relationship by
a fake online persona. Tinder also announced
a partnership with safety app Noonlight that
lets daters “hold down a button on the app to
summon emergency services” if necessary. A
similar “panic button” feature was added to
the Uber app in 2018.Bytes: What’s new in tech
Amazon
is looking
to create
checkout
terminals
that would
allow shop-
pers to pay
for items
with a
wave, said
AnnaMaria
Andriotis in The Wall Street Journal.
The retail giant “recently filed a pat-
ent application for what it described
as a ‘noncontact biometric iden-
tification system’ that includes a
‘hand scanner,’” potentially letting
shoppers link their credit card to
the palm of their hand. “Customers
might insert credit cards into a ter-
minal and then allow the terminal
to scan their hands. From then on,
they would only need to place a
hand over the terminal to pay.”
Amazon has already been experi-
menting with cashierless shopping
at its Amazon Go stores and could
“leapfrog mobile wallets such as
Apple Pay” if the hand-scanning
technology succeeds.Innovation of the week
20 NEWS Technology
A perfect memory for faces