Inside The Secretive AI Company That Knows Your Face

Fresh Air

NPR

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4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

The secretive company Clearview AI scans unidentified faces, and finds a match in their database of billions of photos. The pics are scraped from websites and apps, including Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, without the companies' permission. NYT tech reporter Kashmir Hill found that once your face is identified for a client, Clearview can quickly connect the client to a lot of information about you. Chances are your face is in Clearview's database, without your knowledge or permission. Clearview's clients include many police departments and some government agencies. Hill says it could spell the end of privacy. Her new book is Your Face Belongs To Us.

Transcript

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0:28.0	This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross.
0:31.0	Facial recognition technology is convenient when you use it to unlock your phone or log into an app.
0:38.0	But you might be surprised to know that your face is most likely already in a facial recognition database that can be used to identify who you are without you even being aware it's happening or knowing who's using it and why.
0:52.0	A company expanding the technological possibilities of this technology and testing its legal and ethical limits is ClearView AI.
1:02.0	It's a startup whose clients already include some law enforcement and government agencies.
1:07.0	If you haven't already heard of it, it's in part because the company didn't want you to know it existed.
1:12.0	It did its best to remain secretive until it was exposed by my guest, Cashmere Hill.
1:19.0	She's a New York Times tech reporter who first wrote about ClearView AI in 2020.
1:25.0	She describes her beat as the future tech dystopia and how we can try to avoid it.
1:31.0	Cashmere has continued to report on ClearView AI and other developments in facial recognition technology.
1:37.0	Now she has a new book called Your Face Belongs to Us, a secretive startups quest to end privacy as we know it.
1:45.0	Cashmere Hill, welcome to Fresh Air.
1:48.0	Tell us what the ClearView AI facial recognition technology is capable of doing.
1:54.0	So the way it works is that you upload someone's face, a photo of someone, to the ClearView AI app,
2:01.0	and then it will return to you all the places on the internet where that person's face has appeared along with links to those photos.
2:11.0	So we're talking about anything that's on the internet, your photos on social media.
2:17.0	It could lead to your Facebook profile, your Instagram account, your Venmo account, your LinkedIn profile, reveal your name,
	...

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