
Clearview’s App Used by Justice Department, ICE, Macy’s, Walmart, and the NBA - pulisse
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement
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sp332
"Reporting this story was surreal. Numerous organizations initially denied
that they had ever used Clearview. We then followed up, and those same orgs
later found that employees had signed up and used the software without
approval from higher ups. This happened multiple times."

[https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1233151964881416192](https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1233151964881416192)

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yellow_lead
I know it's been brought up before, but again, I would love to know the mental
gymnastics Peter Thiel has done to rationalize backing this. The same Peter
Thiel that sued Gawker for violating his privacy.

~~~
aaron695
This is not an equivalency.

You freely put photos of yourself on the internet and they use them. Don't
like it, don't publish it. This is 95% of what's going on here.

Gawker took private information on Peter Thiel that he did not want public,
and had not made public.

Hulk Hogan was worse - "at trial he claimed that the videotaping was without
his knowledge or consent"

I think it's great a company is doing this openly. Do you think the TLA
aren't? We also know private Russian companies have been doing this for years.
This is a good move towards privacy.

~~~
FireBeyond
Uh, not so much. Hogan’s situation was worse, to be sure. But Thiel’s PROFILE
PICTURE on a couple of sites was him, shirtless, on gay cruises. Saying that
“he wanted that private, not public” flies in the face of pure common sense.

Apropos of that, courts have long held that billionaires have reduced rights
to privacy due to their “overwhelming influence on public affairs and events”.

That’s why Thiel backed Hogan’s lawsuit (and to my mind, interfered unfairly),
and was not able to sue Gawker.

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tmpynews
That NPR story on this is very informative. Clearview actually has a list of
all journalists and they programmed th journalist's photos into their
application flow. They automatically block and even take away the license of
the individual that is talking to the reporter.

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anitil
Any chance you have a link?

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bgilly
The Daily podcast has an episode on this called "The end of privacy as we know
it"
[https://pca.st//episode/3af9bbfd-6992-429c-9b54-c646b288aef1](https://pca.st//episode/3af9bbfd-6992-429c-9b54-c646b288aef1)
which discusses the reporter's info being masked and the police officer who
worked with her having his access revoked.

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bogomipz
The amount of retail and mundane consumer businesses on here is really
disturbing:

Best Buy, Equinox Gym, Rite Aid Pharmacy, Home Depot, Kohls Department store?

What is going on? What possible use cases do these companies have that require
facial recognition searches?

~~~
moandcompany
For retail businesses, it's likely related to loss-prevention and shoplifting.

~~~
bogomipz
Could you walk me through how that would work in practice though. Aren't these
searches manual? How would this be an effective tool in something concerned
with real time like loss prevention?

~~~
dylan604
It doesn't really take a stretch of the imagination to come up with something.
Ever seen Minority Report? They used retinal scans to ID shoppers to provide
them with targeted ads, just replace that with facial recoginition. For the
security/loss prevention aspect, stores have cameras on all of the entrances.
The facial recognition systems could ID known shoplifters/return scammers/etc
and alert security for "closer" scrutiny.

~~~
bogomipz
But it's not a real time system. You have to have a target and do a search.
From Clearview's homepage:

"Clearview is an after-the-fact research tool. Clearview is not a surveillance
system and is not built like one. For example, analysts upload images from
crime scenes and compare them to publicly available images."

Do you imagine Rite Aid and Equinox Gym which are not exactly bastions of
technology are developing sophisticated Minority Report type systems?

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kylek
Looks like Californians and Europeans can opt out of something (if you upload
a photo ........ )

[https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests](https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests)

~~~
chopin
Opt-out is not legal under GDPR.

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xfitm3
I buy groceries at my local Walmart neighborhood market and they recently
replaced the self checkout kiosks with NCR systems that video your face while
checking out.

Seems to me that I need to use a spare bag to cover the camera, or wait in
line for a human next time I go shopping.

~~~
bobbylarrybobby
You don't think the human-operated registers will eventually also have cameras
next to them?

~~~
dkdk8283
I don’t know, but I certainly hope not. If this happens I don’t know how I can
shop.

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prophesi
Is there a news site that actually shows the leaked list of clients?

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bobthepanda
Breach consumer trust at your own peril.

At some tipping point I could see HIPAA-style mandates come into force for
general data.

~~~
maxerickson
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act)

Took effect this year.

~~~
bobthepanda
I'd hope to see something like this at the national level, but state level is
a good start.

~~~
mokus
Maybe it’s petty but I kind of like the idea of it being a morass of 50
different privacy laws so that a company has to tiptoe through a global
minefield to sell data about me.

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jppope
I'm curious if we're entitled to royalties when our likeness gets used. Anyone
know one way or another?

~~~
binarymax
Probably not. Only if it’s a photo that you own the copyright of, and you
didn’t divest that copyright when you gave the photo to a site that had a
reshare clause in its terms of use.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Didn't Harrison Ford trademark his face? Then they have to pay him to use it
on toys and mechanise?

~~~
sgc
Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties? It seems like a
legal stretch, or at least indicates a legal reality I can't support. Unless
he has secretly had so much plastic surgery he designed it.

~~~
JohnFen
> Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties?

To get a trademark, the mark you're registering has to be actively used in
commerce. There are other laws that come into play if you're using someone
else's likeness in commerce.

The entire purpose of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion (for
instance, to prevent one company from using another company's logo on their
products).

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jgaa
The only relevant response to this is to remove all pictures from Linkedin,
Github and social sites - and only publish pictures on sites we control our
self where we claim 100% copyright for all pictures. May be we could offer
these pictures for sale to 3rd party use, for a small fee of few hundred
million euros per picture. If someon scrape them and use that information
commerially, and we somehow discover that, it's just to send them an invoice
and see them in court.

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uoaei
So much for "our only customers are law enforcement"

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sailfast
Are there any examples so far around gross mis-use of this data? Building a
large list of potential suspects and/or getting some direction for further
study based on a face match sounds very useful, but sending a swat team to
someone's house and ruining their lives based on a terrible match on a crappy
picture is a whole other side of the scale.

I understand why a company collecting this information is annoying /
frustrating, but it was also inevitable, was it not? EDIT: Example, LinkedIn
just got told by a court that they must allow crawling. A quick crawl of
profiles and photos would yield a beginning of one of these types of
databases, etc - one it's on the web, you have to assume it can be used for
facial recognition.

Either way I am happy that people are recognizing the import of what they post
online - even if it's just a picture.

~~~
testvox
Yes Clearview has been abused as specified TFA.

Also Clearview itself has been found breaking the law repeatedly.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/14/class-action-suit-
against-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/14/class-action-suit-against-
clearview-ai-cites-illinois-law-that-cost-facebook-550m/)

~~~
sailfast
Thanks

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sneak
At what point are end users responsible for data they publish globally, such
as instagram images?

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hatenberg
But but China. America really needs a mirror sometimes. Maybe the VP copying
the Chinese health care PR handbook should be another warning.

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sergiotapia
Stop using your real names, use pseudonyms and drop random incorrect pieces of
information. These companies can detect you based on writing style alone!

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microdrum
So it was just a list of customers that was leaked? Sounds like a CRM hack or
something.

