This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 10th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The tech company Clearview might pave the way

to ending your ability to walk down the street, essentially anonymous.

What does that mean for law enforcement and for people who want to be anonymous walking

down the street?

Cato's Matthew Feeney comments.

Clearview AI is a company that's developed an app that engages in facial recognition

and what I think makes it stand out and why it made so much news in the

last couple of months is that it scrapes images that are publicly available off social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

And this I think is notable for a few reasons.

One is I think that when many people think of law enforcement use of facial recognition, they think of people who are in government

databases like mugshot databases.

What's interesting about Clearview is that it allows users to search for a face and compare that face against

billions of images of people who have just chosen to take part in the social media ecosystem and that's I think going to

concern many people who have social media accounts knowing that police who are

users of Clearview can do this.

It's also of concern to people who aren't even on social media.

The technology that Clearview is using scrapes the data of people that appear in photos whether or not they have

a Instagram or Facebook account, for example.

So if you took a photo of me, Caleb, and uploaded it to your Instagram account, it wouldn't matter if I had an Instagram account or not,

my image would still be among those scraped.

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