[VERGE] Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed.

She’s long been focused on covering privacy on the internet, which she is first to describe as the dystopia beat because the amount of tracking that occurs all over our networks every day is almost impossible to fully understand or reckon with.

Your Face Belongs to Us is the story of Clearview AI, a secretive startup that, until January 2020, was virtually unknown to the public, despite selling this state-of-art facial recognition system to cops and corporations.

That’s one of my favorite anecdotes about one of the first users of Clearview AI: this billionaire in New York, John Catsimatidis, who had the app on his phone, was thinking about putting it in his grocery stores to identify shoplifters, specifically Häagen-Dazs thieves, and ends up in an Italian restaurant in SoHo.

The ACLU said, “We filed the suit because we wanted to prove that this Illinois law, BIPA, works,” and Clearview AI did try to say that it’s unconstitutional, that it was a violation of their First Amendment right to search the internet and access public information.

We want to keep out people who’ve been violent in the stadium before.” And then, in the last year, they started using it to ban lawyers who worked at firms that had sued Madison Square Garden because the owner, James Dolan, didn’t like them and how much money they cost him.

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