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Comment by momojo | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of the Clearview AI controversy[0].

I'm not diminishing the ethics debate, but it's crazy to me how easy it was for two non-technical rich dudes in a garage to build Clearview AI (And before vibe-coding!):

  1. scrape billions of faces from the internet
  2. `git clone` any off the shelf facial-recognition repo

It was just a matter of when.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI#History

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Concerned but given the use can it be stopped ?

Yes. If one knows that someone has their identifiable data without consent it is a problem.

While they are pictures on the internet it is one thing, when you gather them all and put a label with a number then it is problematic.

Remember that FaceApp to make you older, younger etc? Imagine how much data those guys collected?

I know someone who submitted the face of a member of my family without consent. You could not even complain without agreeing with the TOS first

Unfortunately we will see this kind of cases more and more with AI rise. I don't believe it is the only app that could do relevant labeled searching in faces etc.

Am I the only one that finds it amusing that conpanies like Google and Facebook sent Clearview legal letters complaining about scraping data from their sites?

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