The “King of Paranoia Rock” was on to something.
When Rockwell sang Somebody’s Watching Me in 1984, the song became a smash hit, though not everyone could relate to its level of paranoia. Now, we all can.
The FBI and hundreds of other law enforcement agencies in the United States have been using technology that allows them to ascertain your personal information from just a photograph. According to a new report from the New York Times, an app called Clearview AI lets users snap a photo of someone, upload it to the database, and wait for the eerily accurate results.
Once Clearview has your photo, it can find matching images from its database of 3 billion photos, culled from sites such as Facebook, Venmo, and YouTube, and link to wherever those photos originally appeared. That could reveal people’s information, including their names, locations, and more. The system, according to the report, “goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.”
Yes, your photos from Facebook really can be used against you.
Luckily, your next-door neighbor can’t up and decide to use the app to start stalking — yet. But Clearview has been employed by more than 600 law enforcement agencies, as well as a handful of companies. If you trust the government to use it well, this could sound like a good thing. Federal and state law enforcement officers claim they’ve used the app to solve crimes from shoplifting to murder.
But it could easily backfire. Last year, one New York man sued Apple for $1 billion, alleging that its facial recognition technology had led to his wrongful arrest.
As for the risk of misuse, Clearview inventor Hoan Ton-That says, “Our belief is that this is the best use of the technology.”
In short, anti-Big Tech and anti-Big Government sentiment may unite against an incredibly invasive form of facial recognition technology. When Rockwell sang, “I always feel like somebody’s watching me/Who’s playing tricks on me?,” he was probably asking a rhetorical question. But now, we have an answer: Big Brother and his tech contractors.
