The file Clearview AI has been keeping on me

But good luck with that; there's a reason why that sort of information isn't sold on a per-person basis.

Traditionally, an average person had a tremendous amount of privacy simply by the virtue of being average. It wasn't worth the time/effort/resources to collect data on them. With ubiquitous sensors, it's now far more manageable or even trivial to collect data on people and use it no matter how unimportant or insignificant you are in respect to money/power.

People of great wealth and power also somewhat enjoy this privacy. Unless you're a public facing official or on the top of the wealthy list, you essentially can also disappear in crowds and enjoy a degree of anonymity. Some may recognize Gates or Bezos in a crowd but drop down to say Forbes 400 rank... #144 (picked at random) and you'll find.. (searching) Leonard Sterm.

Prior to that sentence I've never heard that name and certainly wouldn't recognize him in public even though he is estimated to be worth a modest $4.8B. I might (probably not) interact with them in the future and as an average person, I'm at a disadvantage because I can't recognize his net worth and public information which I could potentially leverage to my advantage in the same fashion someone wealthy/powerful may use their resources to leverage me.

Take this a step further and focus on business investors and participants promoting these technologies, pouring money into them. For example, I can't even name the people involved in Cambridge Analytica even though they were in the news and probably wouldn't recognize them either. Sure, I can dig around and find them but that wouldn't be useful in most situations.

For the most part, your average person doesn't have knowledge or resources to access and leverage such data that businesses are starting to use against the average consumer and worker rapidly and in ways that significantly impact their quality of life.

As such, I would propose leveraging these same identification and recognition approaches against those pulling the strings or in public government office positions who should be fighting for citizens rights and developing a targeted dataset for those folks and exposing it in a way your average citizen could use it. Perhaps as a phone app that can pass a few frames of sampled video back to a service that identifies these individuals and gives detailed public information about them. Make their anonymity suffer. Link it to public facing records of their history, etc. Develop network information for their families, friends, business associates.

Obviously, this is worthless against high profile individuals (celebrities, high government officials, etc.), but a lot of wealth and power hides in the shadows of the general public's eyes yet are pulling the strings on these cultural shifts us plebes are dealing with. Turn the tables and make the technology problematic for their daily lives as well--drag them out into the light for the public--maybe then you'll see more regulation and penalties for using these technologies surface. Just a thought.

There is a right of publicity [1] that tends to come into play if I want to use a photo of you for commercial purposes like advertising. However, if I sell a candid photo of you that I took in public to a newspaper or if it's in a book I sell that's OK. (Assume it's straightforward use and nothing that could be misconstrued or deliberately misrepresents you in some way.)

No idea about this case and IANAL. But it seems in general that I would be able to freely use images on the Internet for training models and for other purposes that don't involve republishing those images.

[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/the-right-publicity....

I'd also like to see what would happen if Europeans reported them to their data protection agencies. Nothing will happen to the company, since it's in the US, but it might make the life of the execs hard if they ever wanted to do business in Europe.

Somewhere between the inter-networked machines and peoples' minds some kind of magical thinking takes over.

Why don't normal people understand that they are being actively fought by organized relentless enemies?

In the old days cities had walls around them, I think we're barely getting to that point on the internet now, despite repeated and continuous raids by all kinds of marauders.