This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm not saying they're in the right, but once you put stuff on the internet it's near impossible to stop people doing what they want with it
That's only true for people who don't care about operating lawfully. A big company cannot practically afford to do the same things as some random fly under the radar niche community.
That being said, this is a US company, so that may be a problem.
Maybe they shouldn't have left the EU.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONDON — Britain’s top privacy regulator has no power to sanction an American-based AI firm which harvested vast numbers of personal photos for its facial recognition software without users' consent, a judge has ruled.
The New York Times reported in 2020 that Clearview AI had harvested billions of social media images without users’ consent.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) took action against Clearview last year, alleging it had unlawfully collected the data of British subjects for behavior-monitoring purposes.
Lawyers have pointed out that the company was under no obligation to purge Brits’ pictures from its database until the appeal was determined — and yesterday’s ruling applied not only to the fine, but the deletion order too.
The identity-matching technology, trained on photos scraped without permission from social media platforms and other internet sites, was initially made available to a range of business users as well as law enforcement bodies.
Following a 2020 lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, the company now only offers its services to federal agencies and law enforcement in the U.S. Yesterday’s judgment revealed it also has clients in Panama, Brazil, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic.
The original article contains 627 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What? Someone downloaded photos that people willingly uploaded to a public network? You don’t say.
I think this argument is silly. It's like if you went Out in public and paparazzi started haunting everyone out on the street, all the time, even though you are no-one famous.
There is such a thing as privacy, and the fact that I uploaded a picture does not give some other random company the right to wholesale process my images.
We should resist giving companies these rights.
Except it's not because these are photos people are choosing to post.
as someone who crossed a tourist hotspot to get to the cantina for some years, my experience can't confirm your statement.
The problem there is someone taking photos of you without your consent, not AI analyzing the photos
But not to be harvested by third parties to be used for God knows what. Sure the occasional meme is one thing (and can have an impact) but this impacts everyone, everywhere, all the time. It's not just that one photo, it's all photos of everyone and also other info like metadata, text posts etc. The fact we don't even know how what and where the data is collected we don't even know what they have combined into profiles.
And this does not even speak to potential harm that could come from incorrectly associated info in your profile.
I am a privacy advocate but I will have to disagree with you. There is no such thing as privacy on public places , or in the public internet. If you upload a picture to the internet publicly then it is publicly available to everyone.
We can disagree here. But if I upload a picture with a specific intent (sharing it in my insta feed for example) why do other companies then have the right to wholesale take these images and use them for other purposes? I think they don't.
And there is a serious constraint on privacy violations like taking my picture when I'm out and about, since the photographer can only be on one place at a time.
What we see here is privacy violations by automated systems on a scale never before seen. Just by taking the photos and processing them.
