Patent Awarded To Clearview AI For Its Innovative, Web-Scraping Fuckery

from the here's-hoping-actual-bankruptcy-will-swiftly-follow-Clearview's-moral-ba dept

Clearview AI has begun travelling the long road back to semi-respectability.

Over the past 18 months, Clearview has gone from unknown to pariah, rejected even by its in-group. It turned web scraping into a surveillance tool, providing everyone from billionaires to repressive regimes with a tool that leverages 10 billion images scraped from the web to create a comprehensive facial recognition system.

Clearview has attempted to reform since gaining international infamy. It claims to have ended all sales to private entities, including retailers and potential VC investors. (Caveat: It has provided no documentation to back this claim up.) It has finally submitted its AI to examination by the National Institute of Science and Technology and received one of NIST's highest accuracy ratings. (Caveat: facial recognition tech is inherently flawed, no matter how accurate it is.) And it has pulled out of a handful of countries where its scraping of the web was found illegal. (Caveat: It has done so only after being placed under investigation and continues to dispute these findings.)

What's next for Clearview and its slow escalation towards begrudging acceptance by governments that haven't banned it yet? Why, it's some IP protection for its AI and its process for matching faces found in Clearview's web-scraped haystack. Alexandra Levine of Politico has the story on Clearview's acquisition of at least one form of government approval.

Clearview AI has gotten the green light on a federal patent for its facial recognition technology — an award that the company says is the first to cover a so-called “search engine for faces” that crawls the internet to find matches.

[...]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sent Clearview a “notice of allowance” on Wednesday, meaning the patent will be approved once the company pays certain administrative fees. The patent covers Clearview’s “methods of providing information about a person based on facial recognition,” including its “automated web crawler” that scans social networking sites and the internet and its algorithms that analyze and match facial images obtained online.

Congratulations, I guess. There's plenty of prior art out there, but Clearview does indeed have a unique product. It's not that it created facial recognition AI that performs in a novel way. It's that it decided it was OK to use the entire web as a source for images and personal information, bundled this all up, and sold it to whoever wanted it. That's the "creative" aspect of it. This is a patent acquired by being a shit-heel -- doing something no other facial recognition company ever considered doing.

The unique aspect -- the one deserving of a patent -- is the most problematic aspect of the company's AI. And with this in its hip pocket, Clearview has now obtained federal government protection for a product that violates laws both domestic and foreign.

For that reason, the only congratulations Clearview will receive are ones it bestows on itself. And it already has. The head of the company somehow views this as a vindication of his godawful invention -- one that relies on the world's population to fill its database. Here's the CEO patting himself on the back for coming up with something universally abhorred.

“There are other facial recognition patents out there — that are methods of doing it — but this is the first one around the use of large-scale internet data,” Clearview CEO and co-founder Hoan Ton-That told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. The product uses a database of more than 10 billion photos, Ton-That said, and he has emphasized that “as a person of mixed race, having non-biased technology is important to me.”

To the first half of that statement: kindly fuck off. That's not an accomplishment. That's a symptom of sociopathy.

And to the second half, may I ask what even the fuck are you talking about? The AI will be biased. There hasn't been one created that isn't. All facial recognition tech tends to do better accurately identifying white male faces. And operator bias will take care of the rest.

Cops will inject their own biases when performing searches and odds are most faces searched by government agencies will be of minorities. Investigators will be free to impose their biases on the search results, discarding those that don't point toward their favored suspects and accepting those that align with the narrative they've concocted. The tools may change but policing doesn't. The only thing Clearview adds is the possibility of cop shops avoiding local restrictions on social media monitoring software use and the ability to engage in their biases at unprecedented scale.

Hats off, Clearview. Enjoy your 20 years of IP protection. Chances are, you won't even need it. Nobody else has tried to emulate your web scraping ways. Maybe that will change over the next couple of decades, but at the moment, you stand alone in your unwavering shamelessness.

Filed Under: facial recognition, patents
Companies: clearview

CBP Proudly Announces Its Facial Recognition Program Has Successfully Nailed A COVID Scofflaw

from the please-hold-your-applause...-forever dept

Customs and Border Protection continues to protect our borders against… stuff. Much like the TSA struggles to catch any terrorists (or, indeed, any items actual terrorists might use) but still issues press releases crowing about the agency's ability to identify and seize novelty items and the occasional gun someone decided not to check, the CBP is more than happy to point out how a system that relies on millions of facial images collected at ports of entry every so often stops someone from entering the country.

As of the end of 2020, CBP's biometric systems installed all over the country had gathered 50 million facial images. This was all done in service of identifying fewer than 300 "imposters." CBP claimed this ratio was a sign of its effectiveness -- that being able to identify 292 imposters who were previously denied entry to the United States was acceptable ROI for millions of dollars of biometric collection/comparison equipment and new impositions on people who cross the borders hundreds of times a year for legitimate reasons.

2021 is wrapping up and we haven't heard much about the CBP's imposter identification program. Until now. If the goal is national security, this release by the CBP isn't any more reassuring than the previous report of ~300 imposters caught at borders -- none of which appear to have been terrorists or members of dangerous criminal cartels. The former group appears to have been mostly composed of people who've already been rejected once at the border for whatever reason.

This latter group of one was rejected for a more timely(?) reason: a lack of proper antibodies.

U.S. border officials are crediting facial-recognition technology with stopping an impostor from entering their country through the Pacific Highway border in South Surrey.

According to a news release issued Friday (Dec. 3), officers using ‘Simplified Arrival’ – a touchless arrival process which compares facial biometrics on documents required for entry into the U.S. – identified a “facial mismatch” while processing a female bus passenger on Nov. 26.

The woman admitted to using her sister’s U.S. passport and COVID-19 vaccination card, “because she had not been vaccinated,” the release states.

Truly amazing stuff. No doubt this will whip up the anti-vax crowd and cause them to decry this as fascism. This will happen while they ignore the years of fascist-adjacent border activity, including the wholesale disappearance of everyone's rights within 100 miles of the border and inland "border" checkpoints that subject people who aren't even crossing borders to the unfriendly advances of Customs officials.

This underwhelming win for an expensive and intrusive biometric system is, of course, being touted as a justification for said system.

“The addition of facial biometric technology and the vigilance of our CBP officers prevented the entry of someone suspected of fraudulently using another individual’s passport and COVID-19 vaccination card to cross international borders,” Brian J. Humphrey, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Seattle director of field operations, said in the release.

Wow. I hope there's still some room on the chests of these fine heroes, given all they do for this nation. Who knows what sort of havoc an unvaccinated Canadian could have wreaked in the Seattle metro area? It's not that COVID isn't contagious or deadly, it's that this isn't how we expect systems that diminish our rights to be used. This isn't the tradeoff we never even had the chance to agree on.

The most generous reading of the American public's acceptance of post-9/11 processes and procedures is that ever-expanding surveillance efforts and impositions on travelers would be focused on national security threats. But not much of it is. Lots of activity at ports of entry is focused on finding cash the government can seize. The rest of it appears to be petty harassment in search of a justification. Even if this "catch" is incidental to the CBP's more important work, the last thing the agency should do is announce it like it some sort of vindication of the federal government's unquenchable thirst for biometric data.

Filed Under: border patrol, cbp, covid 19, facial recognition

UK Government Says Clearview Owes It $23 Million For Violating Privacy Laws

from the your-business-is-no-longer-welcome-here-but-we'll-still-cash-your-check dept

Well, it couldn't happen to a more deserving shitheel. Clearview, the tech company with 10 billion facial recognition images and zero shame, has now been uninvited from the largest portions of the British Empire.

In February of this year, the Canadian government officially asked Clearview to get off its lawn following an investigation by the country's Privacy Commission. The Commission concluded Clearview's modus operandi -- scraping images and personal data from hundreds of websites -- violated the nation's privacy laws. By that point, Clearview had already pulled out of the Canadian market, but not before allowing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to test drive its product. (This test driving was also determined to be illegal.)

Nine months later, the Australian government did the same thing, coming to many of the same conclusions. Local laws were ignored by Clearview when it scraped the web for personal info, cutting Australian residents out of the consent loop. The Australian government told Clearview to get the hell out, to which Clearview responded that it did nothing wrong and that it had stopped selling to Australian government agencies months before, when the investigation was initiated.

That left the county seat of the British Empire (so to [very colloquially] speak), the United Kingdom itself. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, the UK government is offering an incentive plan to Clearview to hasten its exit.

Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is facing a potential fine in the UK.

It has also been handed a provisional notice to stop further processing of UK citizens’ data and to delete any data it already holds as a result of what the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) described as “alleged serious breaches” of national data protection law.

If Clearview wants to do business with the UK, it will need to pay up front. And it will have to change its collection procedure -- one that makes the generous assumption that anything posted on the open web is Clearview's for the taking scraping. Not only will Clearview be expected to delete existing data gathered on UK citizens and alter its intake processes, it will need to open up its wallet and give the UK government what it wants before proceeding.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has today announced its provisional intent to impose a potential fine of just over £17 million [$23 million USD] on Clearview AI Inc – a company that describes itself as the ‘World’s Largest Facial Network’. In addition, the ICO has issued a provisional notice to stop further processing of the personal data of people in the UK and to delete it following alleged serious breaches of the UK’s data protection laws.

Much like Australia and Canada, the UK government says data privacy laws were broken by Clearview when it gathered UK residents' info without their knowledge or consent. The ICO also points out further violations, including the gathering of data without a "lawful reason" and deciding it was entitled to hold onto any scraped data indefinitely, even when 99.9% of what Clearview has collected has nothing to do with current or past investigations by law enforcement or national security agencies.

$19 million isn't exactly pocket change for Clearview. Unlike other tech companies, it's not sitting on massive amounts of VC funding. It's also difficult to say whether Clearview is even profitable at this point. While it has received some capital infusions from investors, its valuation is only $130 million, which doesn't exactly suggest the company is poised for exponential growth.

And its future isn't going to get any rosier if it keeps getting told to leave the country by major free world governments who would give Clearview a veneer of respectability as customers, but are instead delivering even more PR and legal headaches to a company that has done nothing but generate negative press since its exposure. If this keeps up, the only entities Clearview will be able to sell to will be ones that further harm its reputation, turning it into the NSO Group of the facial recognition world. You might be able to make a comfortable living selling to the dregs of international society to aid and abet oppression. But why the fuck would you want to?

Filed Under: facial recognition, privacy, uk
Companies: clearview

Controversial Facial Recognition Company Calls Out Clearview, Demands It Ditch Its Database Of 10 Billion Scraped Images

from the Pots,-kettles-yelling-'black'-at-each-other dept

Clearview has burned its bridges inside the facial recognition tech industry. Despite it being largely morally malleable, the industry as a whole appears to have cut ties with CEO Hoan Ton-That's startup, which relies on more than 10 billion images scraped from the web to generate a database for its customers to match faces with.

The company played it fast and loose upon rollout, handing it out to whoever seemed interested, inviting them to run searches against photos of friends and family members. The "give it a spin" invitations were handed out to government agencies as well, inviting cops to play image roulette with Clearview's ever-expanding database.

To date, the efficacy of Clearview's AI remains untested. Clearview did finally volunteer to have the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) examine its product for accuracy but only allowed it to run a one-to-one test -- the kind that would, for instance, allow a phone user to unlock their phone via facial recognition.

This is not the product Clearview sells. Clearview sells one-to-many matching, relying on images and other personal info scraped from the internet. This practice has alienated the internet. It has also gotten Clearview kicked out of two countries and served with multiple lawsuits. Consequently, other facial recognition tech companies are cursing Clearview both over and under their breath as the company somehow manages to remain viable in the face of months of negative press coverage.

Persona non grata status apparently applies to even other controversial facial recognition tech companies. AnyVision spent some time in the media spotlight for being used by the Israeli military to surveill Palestinians. It managed to take down Microsoft with it (albeit temporarily), exposing the tech giant's pinky-swear-rejection of enabling abusive surveillance to be the lip service it was. AnyVision doubled down on its first mistake(s) by threatening to sue news agencies that reported on this factual development.

AnyVision resurfaced a couple of years later as the company behind pervasive surveillance systems deployed by Texas public schools. AnyVision appeared to be good at what it did. It matched faces per school hot lists and let administrators know any time those faces were detected. A little too good, perhaps. The system racked up 164,000 "hits" during its seven-day test run, returning as many as 1,100 matches for a single student.

AnyVision is back. Sort of. It has rebranded as Oosto, divested itself of some of its more problematic deployments, and is now taking shots at Clearview.

Back in September, it argued that facial recognition companies selling to government agencies should offer customers a blank database -- one the end users could fill with mugshots and persons of interest. This was a clear shot across Clearview's bow. Clearview's main selling point is its scraped database of 10 billion images. AnyVision also forwarded this suggestion to a number of government bodies, including the UK's Surveillance Commissioner and the NIST.

It's always good to be wary of private companies pleading for the government to regulate them more. It often means incumbents are looking for better ways to stave off competition by helping enact rigorous guidelines that upstarts can't afford to implement. And AnyVision's suggested "fixes" for facial recognition tech obviously aims to exclude Clearview from the government market in multiple countries, making it that much easier for the rebranded company to find customers in need of controversial tech that at least won't be as controversial as Clearview.

The war of words continues, albeit behind a paywall:

Oosto (formerly Anyvision) has called out Clearview AI, stating "that biometrics should be deployed with empty databases" in a recent release, referring to the US company's practice of scraping billions of photos from social media to use in its database.

Clearview has offered a rebuttal, but until this one is scraped from its host, we won't know exactly how it defended itself. But it seems clear even from this very truncated exchange of ideas that AnyVision believes Clearview is bad and Clearview believes it is good… making it a minority of one. But one thing is clear: if Clearview gets out of the scraping business it's less likely to make enemies of governments, private citizens, and its competitors in the market. But if Clearview hasn't changed its practices following a year of caustic press coverage, it's unlikely to do so just because a competitor is waving its revamped Gadsden flag in front of any regulatory agency that will listen to it.

Filed Under: facial recognition
Companies: anyvision, clearview

Clearview's Facial Recognition AI One Of The Best In The Business, Says NIST

from the man-but-what-a-business dept

Some good news for Clearview, the bottom dweller of the facial recognition field. The prodigious scraper of web content has finally submitted its algorithm (the one it actually sells to government agencies) to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) and has obtained a score that justifies its frequent blustering about how accurate its AI is. Here's Kashmir Hill with the details for the New York Times.

In results announced on Monday, Clearview, which is based in New York, placed among the top 10 out of nearly 100 facial recognition vendors in a federal test intended to reveal which tools are best at finding the right face while looking through photos of millions of people. Clearview performed less well in another version of the test, which simulates using facial recognition for providing access to buildings, such as verifying that someone is an employee.

This vindicates CEO Hoan Ton-That's heretofore unproven claims that Clearview's AI is one of the best in the business. Prior to this, the only data backing Ton-That's assertions came from an internal test performed by a non-independent entity. Now, Ton-That can add the NIST results to his company's sales pitches, which may make it a bit more palatable to government agencies on the fence about shelling out tax dollars for a sordid little product with an unproven AI. Its previous submission to NIST tested its one-to-one AI (something used to unlock phones, for instance) -- a feature Clearview does not use and does not market to customers.

But this is hardly a vindication of Clearview as a whole, much less its business model. Scraping the open web for images is a really shady way to generate a database -- one that now holds more than 10 billion images. The more hay you put in the haystack, the greater the chances of confusing hay for needles. And these results don't change what's already wrong with all facial recognition tech: the fact that it's always worse when it comes to correctly identifying anyone other than white males.

It also won't make Clearview's web-scraping ways any more acceptable or legal. It has been evicted from two countries (Canada and Australia) for violating national privacy laws. It is being sued in two US states for the same reason. And it has become a pariah in an industry full of morally-suspect tech purveyors -- a company so unseemly even other bottom feeders marketing biased tech to cop shops refuse to have anything to do with it.

And it won't make CEO Hoan Ton-That any less full of shit. This test may have proven Clearview has the AI chops to run with the big boys, but it doesn't change the fact that his claims about helping law enforcement clear cases have been continually rebutted by the law enforcement agencies he says relied on his tech to find dangerous criminals. As long as Clearview remains solvent, it is a threat to people's freedoms and safety. If the NIST test results in more customers for Clearview, it will increase the chance someone will be misidentified and put at the mercy of people with a whole lot of guns and power.

Filed Under: facial recognition, nist
Companies: clearview

South Korean Gov't Gave Millions Of Facial Photos Collected At Airports To Private Companies

from the PLEASE-DO-NOT-FEED-THE-ALGORITHMS dept

Facial recognition systems are becoming an expected feature in airports. Often installed under the assumption that collecting the biometric data of millions of non-terrorist travelers will prevent more terrorism, the systems are just becoming another bullet point on the list of travel inconveniences.

Rolled out by government agencies with minimal or no public input and deployed well ahead of privacy impact assessments, airports around the world are letting people know they can fly anywhere as long as they give up a bit of their freedom.

What's not expected is that the millions of images gathered by hundreds of cameras will just be handed over to private tech companies by the government that collected them. That's what happened in South Korea, where facial images (mostly of foreign nationals) were bundled up and given to private parties without ever informing travelers this had happened (or, indeed, would be happening).

The South Korean government handed over roughly 170 million photographs showing the faces of South Korean and foreign nationals to the private sector without their consent, ostensibly for the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) system to be used for screening people entering and leaving the country, it has been learned.

The agency carelessly handing out millions of facial images to private tech companies was the country's Ministry of Justice. Ironically enough, South Korean privacy activists (as well as some of the millions contained in the database) say this action is exactly the opposite of "justice."

While the use of facial recognition technology has become common for governments across the world, advocates in South Korea are calling the practice a “human rights disaster” that is relatively unprecedented.  

“It’s unheard-of for state organizations—whose duty it is to manage and control facial recognition technology—to hand over biometric information collected for public purposes to a private-sector company for the development of technology,” six civic groups said during a press conference last week.

The project -- one with millions of unaware participants -- began in 2019. The MOJ is in the process of obtaining better facial recognition tech to arm its hundreds of airport cameras with. To accomplish this, it apparently decided the private sector should take everything cameras had collected so far and use those images to train facial recognition AI.

The public was never informed of this by the Ministry of Justice. It took another government employee to deliver the shocking news. National Assembly member Park Joo-min requested information from the Ministry about its "Artificial Intelligence and Tracking System Construction" project and received this bombshell in return.

Maybe the government felt this was okay because most of the images were of non-citizens. This is from South Korean news agency Hankyoreh, which broke the story:

Of the facial data transferred from the MOJ for use by private companies last year as part of this project, around 120 million images were of foreign nationals.

Companies used 100 million of these for “AI learning” and another 20 million for “algorithm testing.” The MOJ possessed over 200 million photographs showing the faces of approximately 90 million foreign nationals as of 2018, meaning that over half of them were used for learning.

With two-thirds of the freebie images being of foreigners, perhaps the South Korean government thought it would lower its incoming litigation footprint. But that still leaves nearly 58 million images of its own citizens. And there's nothing preventing foreign citizens from suing the South Korean government, even though this action can sometimes be considerably more expensive than suing locally.

Lawsuits are coming, though, according to Motherboard.

Shortly after the discovery, civil liberty groups announced plans to represent both foreign and domestic victims in a lawsuit.

The legal basis for the collection isn't being challenged. It's the distribution of the collected images, which no travelers expressly agreed to. Precedent isn't on the government's side.

“Internationally, it is difficult to find any precedent of actual immigration data from domestic and international travelers being provided to companies and used for AI development without any notification or consent,” said Chang Yeo-Kyung, executive director of the Institute for Digital Rights.

It's pretty sad when democratic governments decide the people belong to the government, rather than the other way around. But as the march towards always-on surveillance continues in travel hubs and major cities, using members of the public as guinea pigs for AI development is probably going to become just as routine as the numerous, formerly-novel, impositions placed on travelers shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

Filed Under: biometrics, facial recognition, privacy, south korea, surveillance

Clearview Officially Kicked Out Of Australia For Violation Country's Privacy Laws

from the going-to-be-missing-most-of-the-Five-Eyes-pretty-soon dept

Clearview -- the facial recognition tech company whose unproven AI runs searches on 10 billion images scraped from the web -- has been booted from another country.

Last July, Clearview pulled out of Canada while under investigation by its government. Eight months later, the investigation concluded, with the Canadian Privacy Commissioner finding Clearview's scraping of web content violated the rights of Canadian citizens by gathering their information without their permission.

The same thing has just happened in Australia. An investigation by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), in conjunction with the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, has determined Clearview broke the law there as well.

Commissioner [Angelene] Falk found that Clearview AI breached the Australian Privacy Act 1988 by:

• collecting Australians’ sensitive information without consent
• collecting personal information by unfair means
• not taking reasonable steps to notify individuals of the collection of personal information
• not taking reasonable steps to ensure that personal information it disclosed was accurate, having regard to the purpose of disclosure
• not taking reasonable steps to implement practices, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with the Australian Privacy Principles.

The determination orders Clearview AI to cease collecting facial images and biometric templates from individuals in Australia, and to destroy existing images and templates collected from Australia.

We'll see if that order has any effect. It's unclear whether Clearview has any mechanism in place to determine where content originated from and/or what content contained in its 10-billion image database belongs to Australian citizens. Hopefully it does have something to aid in compliance with orders like these. Because it would be extremely irresponsible -- especially following a similar ejection six months ago -- to continue to scrape the web in contravention of two governments' orders to cease collection and destroy locally-sourced content.

The Information Commissioner says Clearview's collection methods are "unreasonably intrusive and unfair." They also put millions of people at risk for identity fraud if the database were ever to be compromised. In addition, the database undoubtedly contains millions of pictures of minors and other at-risk groups, like victims of crimes -- both of which are given additional privacy protections under Australian law.

The report also notes that Clearview's brief run in Australia had the opportunity to create more than theoretical harm. Australian law enforcement agencies -- including the federal police -- performed test runs of Clearview's software over a period of five months (October 2019 - March 2020). The Australian Federal Police is currently being investigated for its use of Clearview's tech to determine whether its test runs complied with privacy laws.

Clearview's rebuttal to this report claims two things: it pulled access from Australian law enforcement following the initiation of this investigation and that, as an American company, it does not have to comply with Australia's laws.

The Information Commissioner disagrees:

However, Commissioner Falk said she was satisfied Clearview AI was required to comply with Australian privacy law and that the information it handled was personal information covered by the Privacy Act.

“Clearview AI’s activities in Australia involve the automated and repetitious collection of sensitive biometric information from Australians on a large scale, for profit. These transactions are fundamental to their commercial enterprise,” she said.

“The company’s patent application also demonstrates the capability of the technology to be used for other purposes such as dating, retail, dispensing social benefits, and granting or denying access to a facility, venue or device.

“This case reinforces the need to strengthen protections through the current review of the Privacy Act, including restricting or prohibiting practices such as data scraping personal information from online platforms."

Two countries have banned Clearview entirely and they won't be the last to do so. Back in the United States, where Clearview can't use the "local laws don't apply to us" excuse, the company is being sued in two states for the same reason: violating privacy laws. It has no friends in the facial recognition field and its use of web scraping to compile a database of billions of images hasn't made it any allies anywhere else in the tech field.

Sooner or later, Clearview's going to be stuck with selling to authoritarians and oligarchs who give zero fucks about the privacy of their constituents and are always looking for new tools to track down and punish their critics. Given its non-response to nearly two years of negative press, it appears Clearview is willing to wade into this cesspool to ensure it remains profitable.

Filed Under: australia, facial recognition, privacy
Companies: clearview

Surprising, But Important: Facebook Sorta Shuts Down Its Face Recognition System

from the good-to-see dept

A month ago, I highlighted how Facebook seemed uniquely bad attaking a long term view and publicly committing to doing things that are good for the world, but bad for Facebook in the short run . So it was a bit surprising earlier this week to see Facebook (no I'm not calling it Meta, stop it) announce that it was shutting down its Face Recognition system and (importantly) deleting over a billion "face prints" that it had stored.

The company's announcement on this was (surprisingly!) open about the various trade-offs here, both societally and for Facebook, though (somewhat amusingly) throughout the announcement Facebook repeatedly highlights the supposed societal benefits of its facial recognition.

Making this change required careful consideration, because we have seen a number of places where face recognition can be highly valued by people using platforms. For example, our award-winning automatic alt text system, that uses advanced AI to generate descriptions of images for people who are blind and visually impaired, uses the Face Recognition system to tell them when they or one of their friends is in an image.

[....]

But the many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful need to be weighed against growing concerns about the use of this technology as a whole. There are many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society, and regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use. Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.

One interesting tidbit buried in this is that only about 1/3 of Facebook users opted in to use Facebook's facial recognition tool (despite the company pushing it heavily on users). At the very least, it showed that a large number of users weren't comfortable with the technology.

There's also the issue that, while they're turning off the tool and deleting the facial prints, the NY Times notes they're hanging on to the algorithm that was built on all those faces:

Although Facebook plans to delete more than one billion facial recognition templates, which are digital scans of facial features, by December, it will not eliminate the software that powers the system, which is an advanced algorithm called DeepFace. The company has also not ruled out incorporating facial recognition technology into future products, Mr. Grosse said.

That's resulted in some (expected) amount of cynicism from Facebook's critics that Facebook "got what it wanted" and is now moving on. However, I think that's a bit silly. Facebook could have easily kept the facial recognition program going. Of all the regulatory pressures the company is facing, this was way down the list and barely on the radar.

And, to make a bigger point, here's a case where the company is actually doing the right thing: turning off a questionable product and deleting a ton of data it collected. And we should at least encourage both Facebook and other companies to be willing to make that decision based on recognizing the societal risks, and without waiting around until they're forced to do so.

Filed Under: ai, data, deepface, facial recognition, privacy, society, trade-offs
Companies: facebook

Clearview Finally Submits AI For Independent Testing; Only Tests Feature It Isn't Actually Selling

from the competing-for-a-high-score-no-one-cares-about dept

At long last, Clearview has finally had its AI tested by an independent party. It has avoided doing this since its arrival on the facial recognition scene, apparently content to bolster its reputation by violating state privacy laws, making statements about law enforcement efficacy that are immediately rebutted by law enforcement agencies, and seeing nothing wrong with scraping the open web for personal information to sell to government agencies, retailers, and bored rich people.

Kashmir Hill reports for the New York Times that Clearview joined the hundreds of other tech companies that have had their algorithms tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

[M]ore than two years after law enforcement officers first started using the company’s app, Clearview’s algorithm — what allows it to match faces to photos — has been put to a third-party test for the first time. It performed surprisingly well.

In a field of over 300 algorithms from over 200 facial recognition vendors, Clearview ranked among the top 10 in terms of accuracy, alongside NTechLab of Russia, Sensetime of China and other more established outfits.

That seems to confirm CEO Hoan Ton-That's continuous claims that Clearview's AI is one of the most accurate in the business. But there's a huge caveat to his claims and these test results. This test does not reflect real-world use of Cleaview's tech.

But the test that Clearview took reveals how accurate its algorithm is at correctly matching two different photos of the same person, not how accurate it is at finding a match for an unknown face in a database of 10 billion of them.

No one's buying access to Clearview to perform this task. And that certainly isn't what Clearview is selling or promising to potential customers when it pitches its 10 billion image database. So, Clearview calling this test result "an unmistakable validation" of its tech is, well, pure bullshit. It doesn't validate anything. All it possibly shows is that Clearview could be used to verify identity by matching faces -- something that might be useful for unlocking a phone or providing access to restricted areas.

What it doesn't show is Clearview's accuracy when it compares an uploaded photo to its billions of scraped images. Supposedly, Clearview will be allowing NIST to run a 1-to-many test of its AI (Ton-That says that will happen "shortly"). If that happens, we'll finally be able to see if Clearview's AI is as accurate as its CEO has repeatedly said it is.

Even if it is accurate, it's still facial recognition tech -- something that comes with a lot of inherent drawbacks. Every AI tested by NIST showed some form of bias, like performing better when checking white male faces for matches. And it won't change the fact that Clearview's database is the product of web scraping -- something that's not illegal but definitely questionable. Internet users may agree to share information with others and the sites they use, but no one affirmatively agrees to allow Clearview to scoop up that information and sell it to government agencies. That's what has resulted in it being sued in a couple of states, and being kicked out of Canada entirely.

Clearview has no product without the unwilling and unaware contributions of millions of internet users. Even if its AI isn't as terrible as we're all free to believe it is, it will still just be the bottom feeder in a murky cesspool of facial recognition tech providers. Floating to the top of the NIST's tank may give it better copy for its marketing materials, but it won't earn it any respect.

Filed Under: ai, facial recognition, privacy
Companies: clearview

UK Schools Normalizing Biometric Collection By Using Facial Recognition For Meal Payments

from the cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-remaining-canteen-balance dept

Subjecting students to surveillance tech is nothing new. Most schools have had cameras installed for years. Moving students from desks to laptops allows schools to monitor internet use, even when students aren't on campus. Bringing police officers into schools to participate in disciplinary problems allows law enforcement agencies to utilize the same tech and analytics they deploy against the public at large. And if cameras are already in place, it's often trivial to add facial recognition features.

The same tech that can keep kids from patronizing certain retailers is also being used to keep deadbeat kids from scoring free lunches. While some local governments in the United States are trying to limit the expansion of surveillance tech in their own jurisdictions, governments in the United Kingdom seem less concerned about the mission creep of surveillance technology.

Some students in the UK are now able to pay for their lunch in the school canteen using only their faces. Nine schools in North Ayrshire, Scotland, started taking payments using biometric information gleaned from facial recognition systems on Monday, according to the Financial Times. [alt link]

The technology is being provided by CRB Cunningham, which has installed a system that scans the faces of students and cross-checks them against encrypted faceprint templates stored locally on servers in the schools. It's being brought in to replace fingerprint scanning and card payments, which have been deemed less safe since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Financial Times report, 65 schools have already signed up to participate in this program, which has supposedly dropped transaction times at the lunchroom register to less than five seconds per student. I assume that's an improvement, but it seems fingerprints/cards weren't all that slow and there are plenty of options for touchless payment if schools need somewhere to spend their cafeteria tech money.

CRB says more than 97% of parents have consented to the collection and use of their children's biometric info to… um… move kids through the lunch line faster. I guess the sooner you get kids used to having their faces scanned to do mundane things, the less likely they'll be to complain when demands for info cross over into more private spaces.

The FAQ on the program makes it clear it's a single-purpose collection governed by a number of laws and data collection policies. Parents can opt out at any time and all data is deleted after opt out or if the student leaves the school. It's good this is being handled responsibly but, like all facial recognition tech, mistakes can (and will) be made. When these inevitably occur, hopefully the damage will be limited to a missed meal.

The FAQ handles questions specifically about this program. The other flyer published by the North Ayrshire Council explains nothing and implies facial recognition is harmless, accurate, and a positive addition to students' lives.

We're introducing Facial Recognition!

This new technology is now available for a contactless meal service!

Following this exciting announcement, the flyer moves on to discussing biometric collections and the tech that makes it all possible. It accomplishes this in seven short "land of contrasts" paragraphs that explain almost nothing and completely ignore the inherent flaws in these systems as well as the collateral damage misidentification can cause.

The section titled "The history of biometrics" contains no history. Instead, it says biometric collections are already omnipresent so why worry about paying for lunch with your face?

Whilst the use of biometric recognition has been steadily growing over the last decade or so, these past couple of years have seen an explosion in development, interest and vendor involvement, particularly in mobile devices where they are commonly used to verify the owner of the device before unlocking or making purchases.

If students want to learn more (or anything) about the history of biometrics, I guess they'll need to do their own research. Because this is the next (and final) paragraph of the "history of biometrics" section:

We are delighted to offer this fast and secure identification technology to purchase our delicious and nutritious school meals

Time is a flattened circle, I guess. The history of biometrics is the present. And the present is the future of student payment options, of which there are several. But these schools have put their money on facial recognition, which will help them raise a generation of children who've never known a life where they weren't expected to use their bodies to pay for stuff.

Filed Under: biometrics, facial recognition, meals, payments, schools, students, uk