Strange.
Clearview matches your face, but then doesn’t know your name?
What do they give law enforcement?
Here’s
the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too
After
a recent, extensive, and rather withering bout of bad press, the
facial recognition company Clearview AI has
changed its homepage,
which
now touts all the things it says its technology can do, and a few
things it can’t. Clearview’s system, the company says, is “an
after-the-fact research tool. Clearview is not a surveillance system
and is not built like one. For example, analysts upload images from
crime scenes and compare them to publicly available images.” In
doing so, it says, it has the power to help its clients—which
include police departments, ICE, Macy’s, Walmart, and the FBI,
according
to a recent Buzzfeed report stop
criminals: “Clearview helps to identify child molesters, murderers,
suspected terrorists, and other dangerous people quickly, accurately,
and reliably to keep our families and communities safe.”
… If
you live in California, under the rules of the newly enacted
California Consumer Privacy Act, you can see what Clearview has
gathered on you, and request that they stop it.
I
recently did just that. In mid-January, I emailed
privacy-requests@clearview.ai
and requested information on any of my personal data that Clearview
obtained, the method by which they obtained it, and how it was used.
(You can read the guidelines they claim to follow under the CCPA
here.)
I also asked that all said data be deleted after it was given to me
and opted out of Clearview's data collection systems in the future.
In response, 11 days later, Clearview emailed me back asking for “a
clear photo” of myself and a government-issued ID.
“Clearview
does not maintain any sort of information other than photos,” the
company wrote. “To find your information, we
cannot search by name or any method other than image.
Additionally, we need to confirm your identity to guard against
fraudulent access requests. Finally, we need your name to maintain a
record of removal requests as required by law.”
… The
images seen here range from around 2004 to 2019; some are from my
MySpace profile (RIP) and some from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
What’s curious is that, according to Clearview, many of them
weren't scraped from social media directly, but from a collection of
utterly bizarre and seemingly random websites.
… Nicholas
Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science
Institute at UC Berkeley, said that the response "gives you an
insight into the various sources being scraped." He noted that
Clearview is not just
obtaining images from social media sites like Instagram themselves,
but also from other sites that have already scraped Instagram,
like Insta Stalker.
Sell
now,
plan later. Sounds like Marketing is in charge.
THE
IOT TRAP
I’m
sure that you’ve heard about the Sonos speaker debacle. (If not,
read
about it on Hackaday.)
Basically, a company that sells a premium Internet-connected speaker
wanted to retire an older product line, and offered a 30% discount to
people who would “trade in” their old speakers for new ones. The
catch: they weren’t really trading them in, but instead flashing a
“self-destruct” firmware and then taking it to the recycling.
Naturally,
Sonos’ most loyal customers weren’t happy about intentionally
bricking their faithful devices, a hubbub ensued, and eventually the
CEO ended up reversing course and eating
crow.
… This
puts these companies in a tough spot. The more a customer loves the
device, the longer they’ll want to keep it running, and the worse
the blowback will be when the firm eventually has to try to weasel
its way out of a “lifetime” contract. And they are alienating
exactly their most loyal customers — those who want to keep their
widget running longer than might even be reasonable. Given that this
whole business model is new, it’s not surprising that some firms
will get it wrong. What’s surprising to me is how many fall into
the IoT trap.
Should
someone say, “On your mark, get set...”
‘It’s
not just AI, this is a change in the entire computing industry,’
says SambaNova CEO
The
rise in deep learning forms of AI, and the abundance of real-world
data behind it, is pressing the need for a new kind of computer to
replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from
Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia.
… The
last thirty years in computing, said Liang, has been "focused on
instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for."
"The
next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it
flows through a system is really what's going to drive performance."
It's
not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, "we are
focused on the complete system," he told ZDNet. "To really
provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously
provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the
entire system, to integrate across several layers of hardware and
software."
… Another
co-founder is Stanford machine learning professor Christopher
Ré,
whose work includes how to develop neural networks trained
with very little labeled data,
known as "weak supervision."
These
scientists' research provides clues to what new systems perhaps
should do. Olukotun's work has included "Spatial," a
computing language that can take programs and de-compose them into
operations that can be run in parallel,
for the purpose of making chips that can be "reconfigurable,"
able to change their circuitry on the fly.
The
notes you should have been taking all along.
The
Essential SQL Commands Cheat Sheet for Beginners
… This
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our distribution partner, TradePub. You will have to complete a
short form to access it for the first time only. Download The
Essential SQL Commands Cheat Sheet.
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