I’m often asked about my views of privacy in light of having been a cofounder of Clearview.AI. It should go without saying that I do not speak for Clearview and Clearview does not speak for me.
I thought I’d write something up so that I could hand it off to journalists, friends, and family — not all of whom are supportive of my efforts or those of my companies. Indeed some of the people who are closest to me do not agree with me on these issues. I have a responsibility to them. This is an attempt at explanation, not apology. I often like to put into print debates that might otherwise take place in person. I’m better typing than talking.
The tech privacy debate obscures more than it clarifies.
By eliminating the distinction between tech companies that act in the national interest against those who act to exploit the public, that debate all but guarantees that the country where there is no distinction between a private and public sector tech companies — China — has supremacy.
The Pentagon and the so-called deep state recognizes the reality. Ultimately the country which has the most actionable and usable data will dominate the world. If data is the new oil (or new cobalt) it needs to be de facto nationalized with its people coming first. One could imagine, for instance, a data sovereign wealth fund that taxes technology in the service of the state either directly or indirectly and uses those proceeds wisely.
In the modern age the most powerful miners are data miners, which is another term for applied statistics. Statistics itself comes from the need of the state to accurately count, survey, and serve its citizenry. (See generally Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.) Facial recognition is merely the continuation of long running trends moving in that direction of the state wanting to know all that it can.
States require superior information to function and your face conveys a tremendous amount of information about you and the working order of your brain. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the state which essentially invented bureaucracy — China — is well ahead of facial recognition. Nor should it surprise us that China, densely populated yet with low crime, has decided that technology will be how everyone will be kept honest.
In this frame China is hardly alone. The United Kingdom, for example, has cameras everywhere. Those who fear an incipient “social credit score” ought to ask themselves if London is a police state too. If not why not? And what does it mean to have cameras everywhere if everyone has a camera phone?
In America we rebel against this sort of thing, but even here the politics may be more confusing than they would appear at first blush or in listening to the self-appointed (or even foreign compromised).
The Pew Research Center finds a plurality of Americans favor the widespread use of facial recognition by law enforcement. A website called Find Biometrics has the report:
Forty-six percent were in support, while 27 percent said that it would be a bad idea, and 27 percent said they weren’t sure.
Age appears to be an important factor in such beliefs, with a majority of respondents over 50 agreeing that such use of facial recognition is a good idea. Of those under 30, 42 percent said it’s a bad idea, compared to 35 percent in favor.
Political affiliation, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be a major factor; 25 percent of respondents who lean Republican and 30 percent of respondents who lean Democrat called the police use of facial recognition a bad idea, while 48 percent and 43 percent, respectively, thought otherwise.
The facial recognition debate seems very much alive but as with anything, trending in the direction of mass adoption.
In other countries it’s unclear what the public thinks or whether or not what they think even matters. But as China goes, so goes the rest of the world. We like to think of ourselves as different but one of the trends I’ve seen is the convergence of major countries around common technologies. In the main AUKUS and Russia and China all seem to have more or less the same policies when you look really closely and they ultimately seem to develop the same technology. Given China’s lax concern (to put it mildly) for intellectual property and Russia’s turn to international pariah I suspect we will see the development of multiple Internets where everyone will pilfer from one another. Good luck enforcing your patents.
As mental health issues continue to plague our streets thanks to the proliferation of drugs pouring into our country we have a special duty to identify and to treat those who are unable to care for themselves. Public safety means requires keeping the public safe.
As soon as there was daguerrotype there was a need for mugshots.
If anything facial recognition ought to be more widely used than not. Police officers should take pictures, not shots. Taking life should only be a last resort, especially as we are told #BlackLivesMatter. The political calculus has shifted for the beat cop who fears being videotaped being beaten up or doing the beating.
I’m not alone in this thinking. I agree with Axon, the manufacture of Taser and body cameras. It is the responsibility of everyone who works in law enforcement (and on law enforcement technology) to protect life.
Elsewhere I have explained my views around Christianity and technology and how much of the fault of modern tech companies comes from Reid Hoffman — Jeffrey Epstein’s co-investor and associate — who favored investing in companies that catered to the seven deadly sins.
I refuse to be scapegoated for the sins of the sinful tech — which necessitated the creation of these important laws, like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the guidelines for collecting and processing personal information of EU citizens.
Of course Clearview is not exploiting your privacy to sell you ads for things you don’t need. It’s using the bitter fruits of your own narcissism (or misspent youth) on social media to keep you and others safe. We need to draw a distinction between companies that act in the national interest and those which don’t and so far, GDPR does no such thing.
However noble the intent, the European Union’s GDPR is protectionism by another means and many Europeans you’ll talk to will privately agree that this is taxation of American tech companies by other means.
In many cases these restrictions are reasonable and could go further still, but GDPR has long been both annoying and hypocritical. Naturally the European states’ own websites exempt themselves. What kind of standard is this? European companies seldom enforce GDPR on their own national champions — just on American tech companies.
Sometimes protectionism means to protect its citizens — and not just their nonexistent technology markets — and here I am in broad agreement with the Europeans. Facebook is absolutely a menace and I hope the Europeans ban the company forthwith.
Technology must be made safe for women and children. In China age verification on video games helps cut down on “spiritual opium.” Frances Haugen has revealed what many long suspected — that the tech companies are predatory, especially toward the most vulnerable segments of our population. We cannot allow the wholesale mistreatment of young people. Separating the biometric profiles from the advertising engine which powers Facebook ought to be a compelling objective of Lina Khan’s FTC and of Congress’s antitrust subcommittee, artfully run by Congressmen David Cicilline, Matt Gaetz, and Ken Buck.
In the United States, our more mobbed up and trial lawyer friendly states have decided to take a page from the EU. They, too, see a good shakedown they want to get in on.
And who could blame them? Biometric privacy laws become a great way to tax companies from other states, particularly when they are built by donors to a rival political party.
Loevy & Loevy is the leading law firm targeting Clearview.
It should be noted that Loevy & Loevy is not a responsible law firm but an expert in shaking down the Chicago police department. Mayor Lori Lightfoot — no great conservative — argued that the firm had gone way too far in furthering the supposed rights of gang bangers and career criminals. She noted that the Rahm Emmanuel government had paid out more than half a billion in settlements and she rightly predicted that a Loevy & Loevy-backed lawsuit to let prisoners out of jail during covid would lead to more crime.
Many police have gotten blue flu — and stay in the donut shop rather than hitting the streets — as a result of Loevy & Loevy’s lawsuits and Chicago’s ever increasing murder rate continues apace. Moreover, Loevy’s decision to fund Freddie Martinez, an antifa activist, is simply not appropriate. Martinez had been arrested for battery. It was he who supposedly discovered Clearview’s use in Illinois. He is hardly an objective analyst, and he’s gotten lots of free legal advice from Loevy & Loevy. Why?
Naturally many of the privacy bar got paid off by Facebook to the tune of hundreds of millions before beginning a lawsuit against Clearview.AI. Given that Facebook has founded and funded lot of advocacy against Clearview this shouldn’t be surprising.
The IRS recently announced it was looking at foreign funding of nonprofits. Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas has introduced legislation to work on this very topic, pointing to the millions that Russian and Chinese entities "donate” to think tanks.
But why stop there? What about activists and law firms?
It should start with Lucy Parsons Labs and move onto law firms like Loevy & Loevy.
At issue in the Clearview lawsuit is the question of what constitutes a government contractor and government actor. Haven’t nearly every American company been requisitioned by a deep state?
Governments already derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Why would a government contractor, which serves the government and logically the public, need double consent from the public if the public already gave its consent by publishing photos on a public platform and by participating in the society in the first place?
Now there are some examples of the State tilting the debate in its favor. One could read Edward Bernays’s Engineering of Consent or Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, for example, but the very existence of these books and how the state manipulates consent makes the case against consent really existing as anything other than an abstraction in the modern era.
Think of it! The notion that the NSA would have to ask consent of the criminals is laughable. The National Security Act of 1947 was a structured reordering of the state to protect the United States and her allies in an atomic age. Other states followed accordingly. Edward Snowden lost the debate (though he did do us a favor by exposing the degree to which the NSA had been compromised by Netanyahu’s Israel.)
States always have an interest in their own furtherance and knowing who is coming and going is a compelling state need no less important than stopping the state from being obliterated. If it were not so, why have a passport office or customs at all? Why has the west undertaken a sizable effort to build biometric identity in Africa and other failed states?
Facial recognition is not technology that is being used willy nilly but in exceptional cases and with appropriate controls. We see Clearview being used precisely in those areas of greatest need — the riots of 2020, January 6th, Ukraine. Not a week goes by where I haven’t been asked to help identify someone suffering somehow with facial recognition. (I don’t have access to the app, sorry!)
As climate change increases the number of failed states and refugees, we can expect these refugee crises to increase. Are we really supposed to let just about anyone in? Such actions would undermine the consent of the governed who have every right not to have their leaders elect a new people. And when conditions in the home country subsidize how shall we identify those migrants who will need to go back from whence they came?
Unsurprisingly, states exempt themselves from GDPR. EU member states led by France and the UK (which was a member at the time) were reported to be attempting to modify the impact of the privacy regulation in Europe by exempting national security agencies.
The Clearview bet is that the needs of the state will ultimately win because it has to win. This is raison d’état. Now we enter a larger question of whether or not they should win.
Every society has among itself people who cannot consent — the insane, the children, the senile — and here is where the tech debate really lies. Interestingly, as America ages, we also see the senile wander off and forget their names so that, too, has been a surprising use case of Clearview.AI.
The normal must take care of themselves and the greatest among us must take care of the least among us. Have they? They have not. Mark Zuckerberg profited off of the insane with Q Anon and exploitation of young girls and women on Instagram. Not good!
Getting a handle on Silicon Valley can come other ways than through data privacy. The SEC, where Haugen has made her stand and stands to make a bunch of money, seems like a good idea.
Haugen’s suit will force Silicon Valley to answer the question of whether or not that it actually makes the world a better place or simply a more addicted one.
There is a keen distinction between Clearview and Facebook. Clearview makes the world a better place. Facebook does not. A way to think of Clearview is a deep state form of nationalization.
There’s been a pressure campaign in recent years to argue against that but the evidence is clear that Clearview works. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has ended that discussion.
Were Clearview under better management the company could easily become one of the more valuable tech companies in the world.
Will it seize the moment? Hard to say.
Stay tuned.