Facial Recognition Hacked?

Hey guys, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted here! Sorry about that, I’ve been quite busy the last couple of weeks, but I’m back! Time to get back to blogging!

Recently, I was checking out the news, and found an article about Clearview AI. Clearview AI is a company that databases photos of people from websites online. It collects photos that are posted to various social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, among other sites. These photos are then used in combination with facial recognition software, as there is a huge database of face photos to use as comparison.

This seems a little sketchy to me. A giant corporation is finding photos that I post online, and saving pictures of my face and the faces of other people in the picture. Honestly, I personally would be uncomfortable with it, even if they had good intentions. This point was kinda proven to me, when I saw and article about Clearview AI being hacked. Essentially, Clearview AI stores the people that access their database. This includes companies, people that use the database, and also government agencies that use the facial recognition software. The hacker was able to access the information of what companies or clients were using the Clearview AI database. This list included banks, law enforcement agencies, and police forces.

Clearview AI had already been in a bad spot with a lot of people. Back in January, an investigation found that law enforcement agencies had been using Clearview AI to match pictures of unknown faces to the database, to find the name of the person. This caused a lot of outrage with people, and companies such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook asked Clearview AI to stop taking photos from their websites, and some states enacted statewide bans on law enforcement agencies using Clearview technology. A lot of people were concerned about the privacy, or lack of it with this technology. If anyone took a picture of me and posted it online, it would be in a database that means I could be tracked by anyone using a picture of my face. This is a scary thought, and something I think shouldn’t be allowed. I agree with the states’ decisions to ban law enforcement agencies from using the technology, although I personally think no one should be able to use the technology. It’s scary that if a photo is ever taken of you, your face will be in some database forever. People can use that photo to track you, and find you wherever you go, as long as camera’s are around. For example, if you were in a city with a street cam, someone could use that camera with facial recognition to determine where you are in the city. This already seems like a bad idea, but this is further shown by the hacking.

While the hacker didn’t obtain any information about photos or faces in the actual database, they did get confidential info that could put certain people at risk. This doesn’t account for the fact that a hacker in the future could get actual information or data that could directly lead to harm. For example, what if the hacker actually got into the photo database. Then they would have the names and faces of hundreds of millions of people, and they would be able to track them at anytime using facial recognition software. Imagine a hacker knowing your name and location at anytime. Scary right?

I personally think facial recognition shouldn’t be used. While it can lead to good things, such as identifying criminals from videos of their face, the possible insidious usages are a lot worse. Privacy is something I highly value, and no one should be able to violate that. If a photo of me is posted online, while it is technically possible for someone to visit it and save a picture of my face, it’s only viable on a large scale because of technology. That is what I’m worried about. If the technology was banned, then large databases of peoples’ faces wouldn’t be made, and while the individual photos could be accessed by anyone, no one would take the time to do it. Facial recognition technology drastically shortens the time and effort required to database people, which means anyone could do it. Currently, our protection is that it isn’t worth it to manually get photos of everyone and store them. That’s why I think Clearview AI shouldn’t be allowed.