The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

The end of privacy as we know it?

“Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.”

“His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.”

Adding Hacker News discussion on this article, with 150 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083775

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I think something must be done about this. Obviously the potential of this facial recognition technology along with other surveillance technologies is almost limitless without well conceived regulation we are going the road of a surveillance state. China surveillance state is a warning.