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Kashmir Hill

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86
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2023-10-17
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2023-10-17
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  1. “Like this? Should every officer just have this on their phone and use it whenever they want? What do you do after you get a match? What kind of crime should you use it for? I mean, even if we just accept that it's a useful tool, there's still so many conversations we have to have. I know of at least one person who has been misidentified as a criminal suspect because of Clearview AI. He lived in Georgia. It was basically purse theft in Louisiana. He was the hit. He got arrested the day after Thanksgiving, put in jail for a week, awaiting extradition to Louisiana had to hire lawyers to clear all this up. I mean, it can be really damaging when it goes wrong or if the police kind of trust the face match too much. Not to mention what happens if it starts getting rolled out more widely. And we kind of look at China as an example of that. Like, what if we start having a technology like this running all the time on all the cameras, kind of tracking us everywhere we go?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Definitely kind of pushes that onus to police departments and saying, you know, we're just providing the technology for them to use. They should never arrest somebody based on a clear view, you know, match alone and that they need to do more investigating. I think for us as a society, there's just a lot to evaluate here. I've talked to a lot of officers who, yeah, they've solved crimes with Clearview AI as a starting point. Horrific things, you know, abuse of children. But I think we need to ask ourselves, are we comfortable with this database of probably hundreds of millions of people? Probably you and me, should we all be in the lineup every time the police are trying to solve a crime, whether it's shoplifting or murder? You know, if they are going to use facial recognition technology, what are the rules? Do you need to get a warrant to search a database?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Welcome back. We're talking with Kashmir Hill about the big risks facial recognition poses to privacy. This runs right into the trade offs of all technology that is used by law enforcement. And it seems like they are a battering RAM of rhetoric when it comes to why law enforcement is using it. Like you say we're catching pedophiles and thus no more questions should be asked. Whenever I hear that the red flags go off for me, right? You're trying to prevent me from asking questions about the Fourth and Fifth Amendment. You're trying to prevent me from asking questions about privacy by making them seem morally wrong to ask but there's a part of me that says, look, the technology definitely has an error rate. I don't know what the cops are doing. I can't audit their use of it. When they do rely on technology like this, history and statistics suggest that it will have a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. Has Clearview addressed any of this or are they just saying the classic tech company line of this is a tool and tools are neutral and it depends on who uses it and why?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “What want on tat says, what he's kind of evolved into around facial recognition technology is that what the company is selling, you know, this power for police officers to identify criminal suspects to solve crimes is the best possible use of facial recognition technology that they are making the world safer, more secure. It's being used to rescue children. I remember this line from that first interview I had for him where he said, you know, they're using facial recognition technology to find and arrest pedophiles. It's not getting used by pedophiles. So this is what they really lean into, that this is a technology that is making the world safer and they're restricting its use to law enforcement. So this is good that society should embrace this.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So, when the tone changed in a higher crisis person, they start engaging with you and they're reporting. What was the pitch for why this was a good thing to build? Like I can come up with hypothetical reasons why some hypothetical facial recognition system is good to build. But here you've got a real one. Here you've got actual cops who are using it. You've got a bunch of downstream obvious bad things that are happening. What was their pitch for why it was good?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Stays in existence and can keep doing business because it looked pretty bad when I first started looking into them. I mean, their efforts to hide themselves while they're exposing so much about millions of people was not a good look.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, I mean, when I first started reporting on Clearview AI, they very much wanted to stay in the shadows. And they actually were kind of not talking to me, but tracking me. They'd put an alert on my face so that when law enforcement officers who I was talking to uploaded a photo of me to show me what the results were like, the company would get an alert and they would reach out to the officers and tell them, stop talking to her. They deactivated one of their accounts. That was a bit creepy for me. But at some point, they changed their mind and they hired a crisis communications consultant, basically an expert that you go to when you're having a PR disaster. And they went with this woman who she's a political person. She was who Elliot Spitzer called when he was having his troubles. I think she told them, look, you can't stop her. She's going to do this story. And we need to go on the offensive here. We need to defend what you've built.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Watched Thing that really broke this company into the mainstream and made people pay attention to it is your reporting that cops were using it, people were using it, these characters on the right wing were using it. But the company sought no publicity, right? It didn't want anyone to be known. And you started reporting on it. They still tried to hide. And then something happened in Wanton That started talking to you. Honestly started being proud of his company in a very different way, like publicly proud of what they were doing. What was the change there? What happened?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Clayview has been sued in a few states where there's a relevant law. There's the lawsuit in California, the Vermont Attorney General sued them, and basically a whole bunch of litigation got consolidated in Illinois because Illinois is one of the few states that has this really strong law directly applicable to what Clearview AI did called the biometric information privacy act or BIPA. I kind of tell the history of it in the book. It's a bit of a fluke of history that it was passed, but it's the rare law that moved faster than the technology. And so, yeah, they're fighting. They're trying to say, hey, you violated our privacy. You violate this law. You know, get us out of your databases. And the law moves very slowly as anybody who's ever watched a lawsuit happen. And so those kind of suits have been going on for years now.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “They're taking advantage of the gray area too, which right, I mean, that's the thing that just like leaps out to me is Google is training all its AI systems on the public internet. And so is Amazon, and so is Facebook, and so is everyone. And so is OpenAI. And if you go chase down Clearview AI, you might cut yourself off. But then on the flip side, there's a bunch of users. I mean, they're our photos, they're not the platform's photos. If I upload photos to Facebook, Facebook is very clear. These are still your photos. We've signed some license with you or you've not read a license and clicked. More likely that says we can use them, but they're still my photos. Why haven't any users gone after Clearview AI?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I've never really gotten a SAS factory answer to this, honestly I think part of it is that it's a bit of a legal gray area, whether it's illegal to scrape or not. And there's a lot of digital rights groups who want us to have the ability to scrape that, to make it easier to collect information that's on the public internet. And there's at least one kind of federal court ruling in this case between LinkedIn and Haiku, the startup that was scraping information from LinkedIn to basically let employers know if any of their employees were thinking about leaving. The finding in that case was that scraping was legal. And so I think part of it is that these companies don't think they win if they sued. And then I don't know, maybe they just don't want to bring more attention to the fact that the horse is already out of the barn, you know, that Clearview already has all of their users' photos.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “These companies sent Clearview AI, cease and desist letters said, Hey, you're violating our terms of service. You're not supposed to do this. We see this as a violation of contractual law, the computer fraud and abuse act. And then that was it. No one sued Clearview AI. No one forced the company to delete the photos, you know, as far as I know, Clearview AI still has them and is still collecting.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Venmo is actually one of the very first sites they scraped, which is interesting to me because Venmo has gotten a lot of scrutiny from privacy activists who said it was very bad for users that Venmo makes everybody public by default, that all your transactions are public by default unless you change your privacy settings. Like privacy activists have been criticizing them for years and years and years. And Huan told me, yeah, that was great for me because on the venmo.com website, they actually were showing real-time transactions, public transactions between users. And it would update every few seconds. It had photos of the users and links to their profile page. And so he developed a scraper that just hit that site every few seconds. And it was like a slot machine where he just pulls it and like faces come spilling out. So yeah, Venmo was in there.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I mean, several years ago, some of the companies whose data they had scraped, whose user's data they had scraped, Facebook, Google, Venmo, LinkedIn, sent Clearview, CCM.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Database of faces is really interesting to me because it doesn't belong to them, right? They've scraped it from social media sites. They've scraped it from the public internet. They're looking for photos of you. They find them. They clearly have not taken those photos of you. Someone else has taken those photos of you. How is it that they remain in possession of this data set now that the company is public and everyone knows that they scraped all this information?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I mean, it's not completely open source. Wonton Tat was not a biometric kind of genius. He didn't have any experience specifically with facial recognition technology. His kind of introduction to it was through academic papers and research that was being shared online. But he did recruit someone who had some more experience with machine learning and neural net technology. And he said, you know, they fine-tuned the algorithm. They trained it on lots of faces collected from the internet. So clearly they're doing something right there. But it started with, I mean, he started from zero. He really started, he went from Trump hair to this radical app with 30 billion faces. It's quite a story.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So at the time that I first heard about them, and then the first few years working for law enforcement, they hadn't been vetted. No one had tested their algorithm for accuracy in like a rigorous way. But there is a federal lab called NIST or the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and they run something called the Facial Recognition Vendors Test. And so they'll test all these algorithms and Clearview the first time they did the test. They came out really high on the scale. They actually do have quite a powerful algorithm that was really one of the best in the world. And I think at the time it was the top rated algorithm from an American company. So they do have a good algorithm.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “So, I have never had access to Clearview AI myself. I've asked many times, hey, can I download the tool? And they say it's only for police departments now at least. But Juan Tat has run searches on me several times. I talk to him a lot for the book. For me, it was very powerful. It turned up, you know, 160 or so photos of me from professional headshots that I knew about to photos I didn't realize were online, a photo of me with a source I had been talking to for a story. I remember this one photo of somebody and there's a person walking by in the background and when I first looked I didn't see me. Then I recognized the coat of the person in profile walking by. It's a coat I bought in Tokyo, very distinctive. And I was like, wow, that's me. I couldn't even recognize myself. I've seen searches that law enforcement has done. It really is quite.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Who will pay for this? And when it was getting vetted at one of these real estate buildings as kind of a tool to use in the lobby to vet people coming in, the security director loved it and said, you know who would really benefit from this? My old colleagues at the MYPD. And so that's how they got introduced to the New York Police Department. And NYPD loved it and lots of officers there started secretly using it. And this kind of shocked me that police can just essentially get this unvetted tool from some random company and download it to their phones and just start using it in active investigations. But that's what happened. And Clearview gave them free trials. They told their friends other departments. All of a sudden the Department of Homeland Security is getting access to it and officers around the world and everyone's just really excited to have this new, very powerful tool that searches”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “So they originally were trying to sell it to private businesses, hotels, grocery stores, commercial real estate buildings. They would also give it to investors and people who own those grocery stores and buildings. So that was one of my favorite anecdotes about one of the first users of Clearview AI, this billionaire in New York, John Katzmatis, who had the app on his phone, was thinking about putting it in his grocery stores to identify shoplifters, specifically Hagen Doss thieves and ends up in an Italian restaurant, Soho, and his daughter walks in and she's got a man on her arm and he didn't know who it was. So he asked a waiter to go over and take a photo of them and then runs the guy's photo through Killer VOI and figures out who he is. He's a San Francisco venture capitalist and he approved, of course. Yeah, originally they were just like.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Those ideas are really interesting to me. Like, I can see a lot of ways that a consumer might want to search the internet by face or retail stores, like you mentioned, right? You walk into a store, they want to know who you are, what you've bought before. There's a lot of markets. And somehow they've ended up with the authorities, which is maybe the last market anybody wants. How did they end up with the cops?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “And then he moosed to New York and really falls in with this conservative group of individuals. People had a lot of far right interest and was able to build this radical technology because it's open source now. You know, it's very accessible. Anyone with technical savvy and the money to kind of store and collect these images can make something like this. And yeah, they were able to have money around them. He met Peter Thiel at the Republican National Convention and Peter Thiel ends up becoming the first investor in the company that became Clearview AI, giving them $200,000. And though they eventually ended up selling it to police departments originally, it was kind of just searching. It was a product in search of a user. And they had all kinds of kind of wild. Ideas about who might buy it”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Yeah, so Clearview AI is really a strikingly small company, just a ragtech group of people, I think exemplified by the technical co-founder, Juantat, this young guy. He grew up in Australia, obsessed with technology, obsessed with computers, 19 years old, drops out of college and moves to San Francisco. And it's just kind of trying to make it into tech gold rush. It was 2007. He becomes a Facebook developer. Then he starts doing these kind of silly iPhone games. He makes an app called Trump Hair where you can put Donald Trump's hair on people in your photos. I mean, just, you know, kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick. And he starts out kind of liberal. He like moves to San Francisco, grows his hair long, plays guitar, hangs out with artists. And then he”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Were they searching out the market sort of police departments and right-wing influencers? Or do they start with that sort of political bent from the beginning? Because that's a real theme of your book, that a bunch of characters are floating around this company from the start that are not necessarily great characters, to be under company, but they seem to have welcomed it.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Think this was really surprising to people that it's something that's in the book that Google and Facebook both develop this ability internally and decided not to release it. And these are not companies that are traditionally that conservative when it comes to private information. I mean, Google's the company that sent cars all over the world to put our pictures of our homes on the internet. What was different about Clearview AI is that they were a startup with nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing something radical, doing something that other companies weren't willing to do. And I mean, I put them in the same category of being a regulatory entrepreneur as an Uber or an Airbnb that this was their differentiator. They said, we're going to make this database and we're going to reorganize the internet by face. And that's our competitive advantage. And we want to make our database as big as we can before.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “About Clearview AI itself because the big companies have kind of had this capability for a while and to their credit they haven't really done much with it. Google Photos inside of Google Photos will do some face mashing, but that's not public as far as we know. Facebook can obviously do it, but they keep that inside of Facebook. Clearview is just like, we're doing it. We took a bunch of data and we're doing it. Now the cops can look at your face. Why is this company different? How did it start?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “One, just everyone gets the face, right? You don't need to be a technology expert to understand why it might be invasive for somebody just to know who you are or find your face in places that you don't want them to find it. I also think that it builds on all that privacy reporting I've been doing for years, all that online tracking, all those dossiers that have been created about us online that we've created.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “As you've been talking about the book, promoting the book, have you sensed that people respond to it differently on its faces? The reason I ask this is because you have done a lot of reporting about cookies, about advertising tracking, about all of these pretty invasive technologies that permeate the internet and thus modern life. And it always feels pretty abstract. You have to start by explaining a lot of stuff to get to the problem when you're talking about cookies on a website or advertising or something. When you start with faces, it seems immediately less abstract. People responded to the book or the ideas in it differently because it's faces.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “I just think it's so personal. You know, who we are is in our faith. And this idea that anyone can kind of snap a photo of us and suddenly know not just who we are and kind of where we live and who our friends are, but dig up all these photos of us on the internet going back years and years. I think there's just something inherently privacy invasive about that that just is more resonant for people than cookie or tracking what website you've been to. It's really controlling your identity.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “So that first step, we're going to take a bunch of faces off the public internet. A lot of technology companies start by just taking stuff off the public internet. We're in a time right now that the context of everything is generative AI. There's a million lawsuits about whether you should be able to just freely scrape information off the public internet to train a generative AI system. That theme comes up over and over again, but there's something in particular about faces and what clear view AI did with faces that everyone reacts differently to. Why do you think that is?”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Clearview AI basically scraped billions of photos from the public internet. They now have 30 billion faces in their database collected from social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Venmo. They say that their app identifies people with something like 98.6% accuracy. And at the time, I found out about them, they were secretly selling this kind of superpower to police and no one knew about it.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “I am really excited to talk to you. I have followed your work for years and years. You have been on what some might call the privacy beat, what you call the dystopia beat. There's a deep relationship between those ideas in the context of technology. And it all comes to head in this book, which is about a startup called Clearview. It is founded by a number of characters. There's a number of links to the whole thing. But fundamentally, what they do is scan faces and do facial recognition at scale. And there's just a lot of themes that collide in this book. It is kind of an adventure story. It's a lot of fun. Let's start at the very beginning. Describe Clearview AI and what they do and why they do it.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Difficult but necessary trade offs to regulate facial recognition. What kinds of policy and legal ideas we even need to protect our privacy and our faces? And what laws are on the books right now? There's an Illinois biometric privacy law that comes up quite a bit in this conversation. And at the end, Cash tells us why she's actually hopeful that we're not all going to live in a dystopian future. And so it's a great conversation. It's a great book. I loved it. I think you're really going to like it. Here's Kashmir Hill, author of Your Face Belongs to Us. Here we go. Cashmere Hill, you are the author of Your Face Belongs to Us, a book about a startup called Clearview.ai. And you're also a tech reporter at The New York Times. Welcome to Decoder.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Transactions to Flickr posts, and with that data it built a comprehensive database of faces and made it searchable. Clearview sees itself as the Google of Facial Recognition reorganizing the Internet by face searches, and its primary customers have become police departments, and now the Department of Homeland Security. Cash was the journalist who broke the first story about Clearview, starting with a bombshell investigative report that blew the doors open on the company's clandestine operations. Over the past few years, she's been relentlessly reporting on Clearview's growth, the privacy implications of facial recognition technology, and all of the cautionary tales that have inevitably popped up, from wrongful arrests to billionaires using the technology for personal vendettas. The book is fantastic if you're a decoder listener, you're going to love it. I highly recommend it. Our conversation here hits on a lot of big picture ideas. Whether we as a society are just too nihilistic about privacy to make the”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Is almost impossible to fully understand or reckon with. But people get it when the systems start tracking faces, when that last bit of anonymity goes away. And it's remarkable that big tech companies like Google and Facebook have had the ability to track faces like this for years now, but they haven't really done anything with it. It seems like that's a line that's too hard for a lot of people to cross, but not everyone. Your face belongs to us is the story of Clearview AI, a secretive startup that until January 2020 was a virtually unknown to the public, despite selling this state-of-the-art facial recognition system to cops and big corporations. The company's co-founders, Wanton Thatt and Richard Schwartz, are some of the most interesting and complex characters in tech with some direct connections to right wing money in politics.”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nehli Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us, a secretive startups quest to end privacy as we know it, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that's built some of the most advanced facial recognition and search technology that's ever existed. As Kashmir describes it, you just plug a photo of someone's face into ClearViews app and it will find every photo of that person that's ever been posted to the internet. It's breathtaking and scary. Now, cash is a terrific reporter. At The Verge, we've been jealous of her work at places like Forbes, Gizmoto, and now The Times for years. She's long been focused on covering privacy on the Internet, which she is the first to describe as the dystopia being, because the amount of tracking that occurs all over our networks every day”

    2023-10-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT