Clearview AI and thoughts on facial recognition

After France in 2023, our neighbors in The Netherlands fined Clearview AI because of illegal data collection for facial recognition. There's no way to stop this on a technology level. So governments need to regulate. And lead the way.

Some thoughts.

🧲 AI and data collection: an inconvenient truth

This is a case everyone can agree on: this egregious data scraping is a clear privacy violation. We're still awaiting the verdict on what to think about general data collection by AI companies. What these self-proclaimed innovators don't like to hear: it's not because it's out there on the internet, that's up for grabs for anyone to use as they see fit.

📸 You can't hold people responsible for protecting their privacy

Yes, we do need to make people more mindful of what they share online. But you can't hold them accountable for ending up in the Clearview AI database. It's nigh impossible to avoid leaving digital traces in today's digital society. Maybe you pay attention to which photos appear online, friends or event organizers might not.

🧞‍♂️ The genie is out of the bottle ... so now what?

It's impossible to prohibit the technology enabling all of this. The data infrastructure and matching models exist.

That's why we should regulate very strongly against the use of facial recognition:

• Not just because of the privacy violations to create the dataset in the first place.
• Not just because the risk of false positives (due to bias in the training data) has been demonstrated time and time again.

But especially because an instrument like this completely eschews 'the proportionality equation'. To catch [really bad criminal X or Y], you cast a net that follows every citizen wherever they go.

That's unacceptable. I'm glad the AI Act specially prohibits this.

Although ... it does leave some opening for some law enforcement purposes.

🗼Let's just not

Why not just lead the way, and avoid this technology altogether? Technology like this feels like The One Ring. Once you put it on – even just for one special occasion ... will you still be able to take it off?