The great face hack

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tech start-up Clearview scraped billions of people's public photos off social media, and then sold their facial recognition service to police forces, private security firms and banks around the world.

Were the company's actions an invasion of privacy? Were they even illegal? Is their technology as reliable as they claim? Or could it have resulted in multiple false arrests of misidentified suspects?

Manuela Saragosa explores the thorny questions raised by the latest data privacy scandal. She speaks to Buzzfeed technology reporter Caroline Haskins, private investigator and former NYPD detective Mark Pucci, and Georgetown University privacy and technology researcher Clare Garvie.

Producer: Edwin Lane

(Picture: Polygon facial recognition mesh on woman's face; Credit: Erikona/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Okay, you know, we've had a problem here.
0:02.1	I know we are in deep, deep trouble.
0:05.0	13 minutes to the moon. Season 2, coming soon.
0:12.1	Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuela Saragossa.
0:17.6	In this edition, the company that's collecting your mugshot, whether you like it or not.
0:22.4	If you are either posting a picture of yourself publicly or even if you appear in the background
0:27.2	of somebody else's photo, you sort of get involuntarily pulled into this dragnet system.
0:33.8	We're talking about an American firm called Clearview.
0:36.8	It's created a massive searchable database, linking people's photos to their personal information.
0:43.0	And privacy campaigners are up in arms.
0:45.7	I think it is dangerous to have a company deciding who gains access to this powerful but error-prone technology.
0:53.1	What is stopping Clear you from making their system
0:56.2	accessible to a criminal enterprise, whether intentionally or not? That's all here in Business Daily
1:01.7	from the BBC. One ton tat is a young man with striking looks. You can check him out on Google.
1:12.2	There are plenty of photos and videos of him there, not least because he was a model once with distinctive long, dark hair.
1:17.7	And he's pretty good at classical guitar too.
1:33.1	That's Australian Vborn Wontontat playing.
1:34.8	He has his own YouTube channel.
1:39.8	But these days, his greatest hit is a company he developed when he moved to the US.
1:46.7	It's called Clearview, and it's a facial recognition startup that's amassed a database of billions of people's photos,
1:53.5	scraped from social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, linking their images to personal information.
1:56.0	A search engine for faces, if you like.
	...

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