Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Clearview AI is disturbing. I have had a public conversation with one of the founders (who had left the company), where he said, "you civil libertarian types are all going to lose. We are going to steamroll you." And dismissed any and all concerns related to the technology.

They've taken the data without consent and sold it to police departments across the world with provable records of human rights violation, whilst claiming a 100% facial match accuracy. I am not exaggerating. They claim — to the police departments they sell to — that their technology is 100% accurate and doesn't have false positives. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinehaskins1/clearv...

They are a combustible mix of greed and ambition with lies sprinkled into the mix. It astounded me that he had the gall to say and imply in a public setting that they are "civil libertarian types" (like me) were going to go the way of the dodo and that the totalitarian surveillance state was the way of the future.

I hope he is proven wrong. And I hope that they get sued and sanctioned out of existence like the NSO Group.

> public conversation Is there a verifiable record somewhere? I think there's no outrage because this is unknown to laypeople. However, I've very confident this would be a unifying issue for far left and right internet-outrage machines.

> I hope he is proven wrong.

Was it the failed model that ran some phishing schemes and hired people to commit mass copyright infringement to build their database or the right wing politician that built ideological porn filtering software that blocked the ACLU and EFF?

Are those really the people we want controlling technology that's ethically questionable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI

> I hope he is proven wrong.

Covid provided a massive boost for all of these kinds of systems. I say the cat is out of the bag. Just like when passports came to being “a thing” back in WW1. Before WW1 the British Empire convinced Belgium to drop the idea of passports. During WW1 governments across the world realised that using passports to control who can come to their country was easily sold to their citizens. 100 years later they are standardised across the planet. I can see the current trend of vaccine passports and the tracking in the same vein.

> "you civil libertarian types are all going to lose. We are going to steamroll you." And dismissed any and all concerns related to the technology.

That's pretty spot on, matches with my experience as well as every historical record ever written. We have a country right now that has installed labor/concentration camps and the rest of the world is dancing to their fiddle. Steamroll is an understatement. I don't want to know what is going on at those camps, but it wouldn't surprise me if many wish they could be steamrolled to end it all.

"Civil Libertarian Types" are abound on HN. They forget human nature and think that change is right around the corner. Sometimes I wonder if they're playing the devil's advocate or if they're really that stupid. It's bread and circuses of a very amusing and gullible sort.

These sort of people have no incentive whatsoever to change what they're doing. So yes, they're laughing at you as they fuck you over and profit from it. They know you're powerless, and they know you know it too.

What are you going to do about it? I'd genuinely like to see more than keyboard warring from you CLTs, but you're pretty useless about the whole thing.

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