By Gaby Pesantez
Science & Technology
We are entering a reality where humanity’s darkest impulses can so easily be amplified by the power and reach of emerging technological developments. This is a world where a stranger across the street can snap your photo in passing, employing commercially available facial recognition software to uncover your name, contact information, place of work, social media accounts, and every other piece of private information tied to your image online — all for just $29.99 a month. Armed with new, unregulated facial recognition technology, malevolent actors may strip civilians of their anonymity — with major implications in every sector of life.
This is a world where women and gender minorities will face unprecedented threats as they navigate new, potent manifestations of stalking, harassment, and controlled access to sensitive reproductive and medical care in a world where surveillance is the norm. This is also a world where our rights to free speech and peaceful assembly as we know them are to be outweighed by technology companies’ economic objectives — with protesters easily doxed by their opponents from a single photograph and, thereafter, disincentivized from exercising their free expression.
In the current day and near future, with privacy increasingly scarce, minority communities across the United States have and will continue to feel the disproportionate brunt of this technology’s impacts. Facial recognition software has already been used 22,000 times in New York City since 2017, and the technology threatens to exacerbate racially discriminatory policing. Further, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already used the technology on millions, targeting undocumented communities. Beyond its use amongst law enforcement officers, the technology has also been employed by landlords, often seeking to surveil Black and Brown communities.
Clearview AI is amongst the world’s arsenal of new and emerging facial recognition technologies. New York Times writer Kashmir Hill, in a January 2020 piece on the start-up, reported that “more than 600 law enforcement agencies [had] started using Clearview in the past year” and that “Clearview had also licensed [its] app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.” Since then, the company has been banned from selling its product to private U.S. businesses, sparking their current specialization in bringing the technology specifically to law enforcement agencies across the country.
Use of Clearview AI is especially notable within police departments, including the New York City Police Department (NYPD). By offering free, 30-day trials to officers in its early days, the company quickly amassed praise from officers who later requested that their departments subscribe en masse to the technology. While the technology has assisted some officers as they solve crimes, it raises serious questions of legal and privacy violations. After all, Clearview’s current database of over 30 billion images was scraped indiscriminately via artificial intelligence from private and public social media profiles, a practice that directly violates most social media companies’ Terms of Service agreements but has been left legally unchallenged owing to the novelty of the issue.
If you have any online presence whatsoever, be it on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Venmo, or millions of other websites, your image may very well already be found within Clearview’s database with no option for recourse in most U.S. states. Companies like Clearview AI profit off of civilians’ scraped data, claiming to hold First Amendment rights to ownership over your own personal images. The deal is this: you pay the price, often unknowingly, of being placed in a ‘“perpetual police lineup.’” A company grows at your expense, placing you at constant risk of misidentification, of false arrest, of search without warrant, and entirely at the whims of investors and law enforcement officials who might even seek to employ these technologies against you for malevolent or personal gain. It is your right to feel outraged and to demand action from our government at the state and federal levels. As a center of innovation in the world and the headquarters of many of these companies, the United States must be willing to react to such unprecedented challenges in technology governance by, first and foremost, prioritizing humanity and not an exploitative business model seeking to alter our way of life for the worse.
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