App Lets Strangers Find Your Name & Info From A Photo

[maximus otter]

What if a stranger could snap your picture on the sidewalk then use an app to quickly discover your name, address and other details? A startup called Clearview AI has made that possible, and its app is currently being used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the US, including the FBI, says a Saturday report in The New York Times.

The app, says the Times, works by comparing a photo to a database of more than 3 billion pictures that Clearview says it's scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared. A name might easily be unearthed, and from there other info could be dug up online.

The size of the Clearview database dwarfs others in use by law enforcement.

https://www.cnet.com/news/clearview...r-name-info-with-snap-of-a-photo-report-says/

maximus otter

 

[James_H]

No way that could possibly go wrong, or lead to a spate of crimes or anything like that if the tech got into the wrong hands.

This also sounds like the kind of Orwellian things they do in China.

Any idea of the legality of it?

 

[maximus otter]

No way that could possibly go wrong, or lead to a spate of crimes or anything like that if the tech got into the wrong hands.

This also sounds like the kind of Orwellian things they do in China.

Any idea of the legality of it?

l know even less about civil law than l do about criminal law, but this doesn’t sound encouraging:

“There is currently no freestanding right to privacy in common law.”

maximus otter

 

[Yithian]

It's almost as if uploading labelled pictures of yourself with time and location metadata embedded to publicly accessible websites might be a bad idea.

 

[James_H]

It's almost as if uploading labelled pictures of yourself with time and location metadata embedded to publicly accessible websites might be a bad idea.

A good point. Remember a little while ago there was a Russian photo filters app that was accused of stealing users' images and data? Scary indeed. But half of the people outraged by it are already in Facebook, which does exactly the same thing.