Comment by towe12301923 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by towe12301923 | Hacker News Reader

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> The commissioners found Clearview scraped images of faces and associated data from publicly accessible online sources (including social media) and stored it in its database.

> What the commissioners recommended was that Clearview:

> • cease offering facial recognition services to Canadian clients;

> • cease collecting, using and disclosing images and biometric facial arrays collected from individuals in Canada, and;

> • delete images and biometric facial arrays collected from individuals in Canada.

> The company said those recommendations were impossible to execute.

Clearview claims that they have stopped selling to Canadian clients but they don't know where the people in the images are from. Probably true if they're just scraping images, but their argument seems to be "innocence by ignorance".

We don't usually allow that sort of argument in other areas. Stores cannot sell cigarettes/alcohol to minors and banks cant unknowingly launder money, and it is on them to make sure they collect enough data to comply with those laws. It may be hard or even impossible for Clearview to operate while following the law.. but maybe that just means they shouldn't.

>Clearview claims that they have stopped selling to Canadian clients but they don't know where the people in the images are from. Probably true if they're just scraping images, but their argument seems to be "innocence by ignorance".

This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata?

> This part of their defence is outright laughable. What's the point of having this sort of database without the associated metadata?

I'm not a fan of Clearview AI, but I understand it's still useful even for faces that aren't explicitly tied to an identity in the system, because the if the police know where the matched photo is from, they can do the legwork to fill in the missing details.

I think one of the examples in an early article about it had the police feeding a suspect's face into it. The system found a match in the background of some photo taken at a trade show (the guy was working a both). It only knew the website the photo was from, which allowed the police the identify the trade show, which allowed them to track down the people working at that booth to find their suspect.

The last ones I want to "help" with this data is the police, known for misuse of tech since forever.

The point being... _they then know where it's from_, that's the metadata. If they know the trade show, then they know where and when it was, whether it was in Canada and whether they need to delete it.

> The point being... _they then know where it's from_, that's the metadata. If they know the trade show, then they know where and when it was, whether it was in Canada and whether they need to delete it.

In most cases they probably only know the URL, and it's far from trivial (or even possible in a general case) to mechanically derive if photo was taken in Canada from that.

Personally I hope they're forced to overshoot and delete far more than necessary to ensure compliance (e.g. only keep photos they can positively determine were taken outside of Canada).

If they don't know where something was recorded, then they should be forced to delete it. Let them go bankrupt if need be.

They don't, they just know the original URL. IIRC, they also scrape news websites and it's impossible to automatically and correctly detect the location of a person.

Even if it's from a social network, you still can't be sure. Especially, if a photo have multiple persons.

It is so impossible that it is the actual use case they are selling?

" The system found a match in the background of some photo taken at a trade show (the guy was working a both). It only knew the website the photo was from, which allowed the police the identify the trade show, which allowed them to track down the people working at that booth to find their suspect."

Just as evidence I'm not defending them, I find their project totally unethical, and the owners and their associates are also highly involved with internet fascism and credential phishing (I know the source isn't the best, but I recommend reading the article): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recogniti...

With that said: the order is clearly impossible to execute. There's a huge difference between police clicking on a URL in a result and manually investigating to determine the location and having their system automatically determine the location of all photos and delete the ones that are in Canada.

> With that said: the order is clearly impossible to execute.

It is clearly possible to execute, it would just require much higher costs per image that ClearView processes and the probable need for ClearView to avoid using any images that they can't verify the location of in am economical fashion.

Saying it is "impossible" is different from saying that the costs of compliance would fundamentally change ClearView's business model.

I think at that point most people would consider it a very different kind of service.

You don't need the Internet or AI to collate pictures and the data on them into a database.

Sure, but the point is that their business is not viable then. If it's illegal to serve childporn and imgur can't profitably detect if it's serving childporn or not, then imgur is doomed. I think no one would dispute that?

Depends, what level of accuracy are you demanding?

If the answer is 100%, then yes, all user-generated content on the internet will have to be banned unless subject to manual human review before allowing the post to be seen, and even that is probably not perfect.

You might have misunderstood tablespoon's remark:

"if the police know where the matched photo is from"

The "matched photo" is the right argument in the function

  match(photo_scraped_by_clearview, photo_of_interest)

The matched photo is some piece of evidence the police already have from some investigation, e.g. surveillance camera or whatever. They know exactly where they got it. This is matched against the Clearview AI database. So then that match attaches information to the Clearview AI photo. They may be able to figure out where that was taken, since it is narrowed down.

Then they can delete their database and start over. Not knowing something doesn't excuse someone from responsibility.

Also, it opens up a very simple avenue for the watchdog: they might require Clearview to delete any data for which they can't prove that it's not Canadian.

Clearview said its facial recognition search engine "compares user-provided images of faces to a database of images indexed from public web pages. The tool allows law enforcement and national security agencies to identify victims and perpetrators of crimes.

How is this fundamentally different from Google image search? [0]

Did Clearview do something to be investigated? The commission essentially claimed they read about the company in the news and decided to act based on that. [1] It seems odd that haven't they investigated Google for the same. [2]

0. https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZivCGA7FJZHmFkT5r4...

1. https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/investig...

2. https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/investig...

They can both be bad.

You don't stop going after one criminal because there are others.

Seemingly neutral laws can be enforced inequitably or corruptly. A government that goes after the little guys and gives big cos a pass is illegitimate.

> A government that goes after the little guys and gives big cos a pass is illegitimate.

A government that governs without consent of the governed is illegitimate. A government that governs inconsistently is not necessarily illegitimate. The legitimacy of a government is not determined by any particular small-large business axis. Viewing the world through that axis is not helpful in this case.

And while we're at it, just because your government is unfair doesn't make it illegitimate. There are plenty of state governments[1] that were, and are incredibly unfair in their enforcement of their laws, but when they aren't actively stealing elections, I wouldn't call them illegitimate.

[1] For a crystal-clear example, the south under Jim Crow. Unfair laws, unfair enforcement of laws, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue that many of those governments did not have the consent of most of who they governed.

> A government that governs without consent of the governed is illegitimate.

This is not exactly a mainstream viewpoint.

> For a crystal-clear example, the south under Jim Crow. Unfair laws, unfair enforcement of laws, but I'd be hard-pressed to argue that many of those governments did not have the consent of most of who they governed.

But in the other direction, it's trivially easy to argue that many major governments did not have the consent of the governed. e.g. the Qing dynasty was hated by the Chinese people it ruled.

The consent of the governed is not even a theoretically valid concept as applied to large groups. You rule through force.

You are correct, it's possible to further expand that definition of legitimacy, to include de-facto legitimacy (I am the guy in charge, I might be in charge because I rule through fear and force, but since I am the guy in charge, I am legitimate.)

My point is that it doesn't make much sense to contract the definition of legitimacy. At a minimum, if a government has the consent of the governed, it is legitimate.

If it does not, well, we can split hairs about whether or not being a warlord, a king, or some other kind of despot counts.

> A governments that governs inconsistently is not necessarily illegitimate.

Fair enough, I suppose legitimacy is in the eyes of the beholder, which happens to be itself.

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