I posted yesterday about the under-the-radar facial recognition catalog and software now being built up by Clearview AI and already supplied to 600 or so law enforcement groups. mashable.com/…
Todays opinion piece by Bruce Schneier is also well worth a read. He identifies identification, correlation and discrimination as the 3 salient factors in todays tech intrusions. I encourage you to read this essay as he identifies how the corporate drive to differentiate consumers — targeting ads , for example- creates a streamlined method to discriminate . You might , for instance, encounter barriers in the way of a different and higher price for the same items …..
Yesterday’s NYT article also saw the quite spooky ability to ID and then temporarily freeze access by a specific reporter based on merely the searches and phone calls that were made during an open process of discovery. As I said, the current push to outlaw demonstrations and to use the “terrorist” designation to squelch opposition are already in the works. Far too easy to link the tech with the ugly politics of power.
Schneier urges us to ask for a multi prong approach:
Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.
Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated; there’s only one law — passed in Vermont in 2018 — that requires data brokers to register and explain in broad terms what kind of data they collect. The large internet surveillance companies like Facebook and Google collect dossiers on us more detailed than those of any police state of the previous century. Reasonable laws would prevent the worst of their abuses.
Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies to discriminate. Discrimination based on protected characteristics like race and gender is already illegal, but those rules are ineffectual against the current technologies of surveillance and control. When people can be identified and their data correlated at a speed and scale previously unseen, we need new rules.
If the autocrats gain much more of a foothold, it will be too late to get these safeguards in place. This coming election holds so much in the balance…..