Opt out of Clearview.ai (opens in new tab)

> the system shouldn't have been made in the first place,and the mere existence of it guarantees the capability for it to be abused

I casually know the guys who made this, and they're, well, unorthodox thinkers in terms of ethics. I highly doubt that, say, government regulations would've prevented them from building this app (although it may prevent them from using it in certain regions).

It's very hard to put neural network and image recognition tools into public hands and also prevent anyone in the world from building something like this. Such is the Pandora's Box of technology.

This. Just as every obscenity filter has to have a list of obscenities to work, these creepy bastards will track you to not-track you.

We need laws. (Or just let everybody know everything: "Privacy is dead".)

Well if you legally have to be able to opt out, and they can't opt you out without completely reworking their business, then legally it seems like they should have to rework their business if you opt out. I'd call that a functioning opt out, even though I expect I'm being unrealistically optimistic :(

Yes, I think this is what they'd argue too. But something to think about: Recently Google was asked (in France[1]) to start paying publishers for including news snippets in search results. That data is also "public" in the sense that it is available for crawling, but it is still owned by creators who can (and did) exercise rights to limit use. Presence of a third platform like Facebook further complicates this (I don't know if you sign off your rights to your photos when you upload them to FB for example).

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/french-regulator...

In raw, mathematical black/white terms, yes, I grant that image with my name next to it is technically public. However, uploading a profile portrait is typically intended for someone who searches for your name to determine whether or not a particular URL represents the person they met offline. I have to walk past a security camera to go through a store checkout - my image is in that camera because I want to buy stuff, not because I want my image to be public - and I might present my ID to the clerk because I want to be identified as of age to legally buy alcohol, not because I want the camera to link my face to my name (and my purchase list) or anything creepy like that.

When a person uploads a profile picture or appears in a security camera feed, they typically have an intent that doesn't match Clearview's use case, and an expectation that the stuff that Clearview.ai is trying to do with the image was humanly impossible. Historically, it has been impossible. True, some people are good with faces, and I'm sure some of them work in law enforcement or advertising, but no one can cross-reference 7 billion profile pictures to every security camera on the planet, and remember who went where at what time.

I'd argue that there's a fundamental difference in whether a right does or does not apply based on scale. A human looking at one data point needs to be approached ethically and legislatively differently from a machine looking at a million identical data points, because the use cases are different.

Clearview.ai is trying to make a land grab on human rights, asserting that because the things that they're trying to do have not yet been prohibited (because they're complicated, and because no one realized they were feasible) that they ought to continue to be allowed to do them.

What part of fb is considered a 'public source'?

I think that it can be like how github lets you have public repos that are covered under whatever license you like. Being public doesn't invalidate those licenses. Or if Disney made a movie free on youtube for a day, it doesn't lose legal protection over that movie.

Most content on flickr for example, has a non-commercial CC license.

By your logic:

1. train a model with A-list actors' tabloid photos

2. make a CGI feature film

3. ???

Profit!

> I'd watch court proceedings, that try to figure out if the auto-encoded version of a picture still is under GDPR protection.

That’d be a fascinating case!

If these were people rather than computers, I don’t think you could ask them to forget a face. But they could be asked to destroy notes or derived work.

Often, these companies will not only do as you suggested, they will turn around and sell your data at a premium (since it's been confirmed) to third-party companies before marking it as hidden.

I tried out brandyourself.com.

Once with my real info (against all reason), the second time I entered some random name and adress that couldn't possibly be real.

In both cases, I was told that I was highly exposed and that I should pay hundreds of $ per year to protect my privacy.

Also, I recognized several dark/shady design patterns.

I can only conclude that this is a very elaborate way to scare people out of money.

Consider the absurdity of the request. Send us a nude so we can play a better game of whack a mole. Also, consider the mental state of the person being asked to submit such a photo.

I mean good grief.

And this is before we even get into the fact that we’re talking about Facebook.

Yes, but the problem is what if the "opt out" dataset is leaked. What if a Facebook employee steals the data.

IMHO if this kind of measurements are required to protection the user it's _generally_ a better idea to not have a system which requires that.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

They say they scraped the open web - so for example this would include many of our personal sites, many of which have profile pictures. For myself, I took the picture on my site, and it's under a: Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives CC license. I'd argue that

1. Using my/anyone's profile picture in an AI system for profit is commercial use. 2. A neural network is a derivative work of all images used to train that network.

If they keep scraping does that mean I have to keep opting out?

This is already the case with GDPR, which is clearly ignored here since plenty of people from GDPR regions seem to be affected.

Not op, but I make a point of not having my face in profile pictures.

The next request is your government-issued ID :-)

Agreed. Depending on which option you choose, this could further improve their model. For example, they could use it to confirm your identity and improve recognition of you. Even if they never disclosed your id, they could use it reject subjects that would otherwise have a possibility of being you.

Of course it is. These people are sociopaths.

CCPA here. I submitted an info request, a data-deletion request, and an opt-out request. I got 0 responses.

At what point does an investigator take a look at this?

You're totally right. The sky-high salaries + options + bonuses make it a hard sell to get devs to follow their values in choosing employers. I just found it telling how grudgingly this complies with the law, but you could say privacy violation is their core service so obviously they need to protect that.