#guide to privacy

[thatsbelievable]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kashmir Hill’s “Your Face Belongs to Us”

This Friday (September 22), I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. That night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

Your Face Belongs To Us is Kashmir Hill's new tell-all history of Clearview AI, the creepy facial recognition company whose origins are mired in far-right politics, off-the-books police misconduct, sales to authoritarian states and sleazy one-percenter one-upmanship:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/your-face-belongs-to-us-by-kashmir-hill/

Hill is a fitting chronicler here. Clearview first rose to prominence – or, rather, notoriety – with the publication of her 2020 expose on the company, which had scraped more than a billion facial images from the web, and then started secretly marketing a search engine for faces to cops, spooks, private security firms, and, eventually, repressive governments:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Hill's original blockbuster expose was followed by an in-depth magazine feature and then a string more articles, which revealed the company's origins in white nationalist movements, and the mercurial jourey of its founder, Hoan Ton-That:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/facial-recognition-clearview-ai.html

The story of Clearview's technology is an interesting one, a story about the machine learning gold-rush where modestly talented technologists who could lay hands on sufficient data could throw it together with off-the-shelf algorithms and do things that had previously been considered impossible. While Clearview has plenty of competitors today, as recently as a couple of years ago, it played like a magic trick.

That's where the more interesting story of Clearview's founding comes in. Hill is a meticulous researcher and had the benefit of a disaffected – and excommunicated – Clearview co-founder, who provided her with masses of internal communications. She also benefited from the court documents from the flurry of lawsuits that Clearview prompted.

What emerges from these primary sources – including multiple interviews with Ton-That – is a story about a move-fast-and-break-things company at the tail end of the forgiveness-not-permission era of technological development. Clearview's founders are violating laws and norms, they're short on cash, and they're racing across the river on the backs of alligators, hoping to reach the riches on the opposite bank without losing a leg.

A decade ago, they might have played as heroes. Today, they're just grifters – bullshitters faking it until they make it, lying to Hill (and getting caught out), and the rest of us. The founders themselves are erratic weirdos, and not the fun kind of weirdos, either. Ton-That – who emigrated to Silicon Valley from Australia as a teenager, seeking a techie's fortune – comes across as a bro-addled dimbulb who threw his lot in with white nationalists, MAGA Republicans, Rudy Guiliani bagmen, Peter Theil, and assorted other tech-adjascent goblins.

Meanwhile, biometrics generally – and facial recognition specifically – is a discipline with a long and sordid history, inextricably entwined with phrenology and eugenics, as Hill describes in a series of interstitial chapters that recount historical attempts to indentify the facial features that correspond with criminality and low intelligence.

These interstitials are woven into a-ha moments from Clearview's history, in which various investors, employees, hangers-on, competitors and customers speculate about how a facial-recognition system could eventually not just recognize criminals, but predict criminality. It's a potent reminder of the AI industry's many overlaps with "race-science" and other quack beliefs.

Hill also describes how Clearview and its competitors' recklessness and arrogance created the openings for shrewd civil libertarians to secure bipartisan support for biometric privacy laws, most notably Illinois' best-of-breed Biometric Information Privacy Act:

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&ChapterID=57

But by the end of the book, Hill makes the case that Ton-That and his competitors have gotten away with it. Facial recognition is now so easy to build that – she says – we're unlikely to abolish it, despite all the many horrifying ways that FR could fuck up our societies. It's a sobering conclusion, and while Hill holds out some hope for curbing the official use of FR, she seems resigned to a future in which – for example – creepy guys covertly snap photos of women on the street, use those pictures to figure out their names and addresses, and then stalk and harass them.

If she's right, this is Ton-That's true legacy, and the legacy of the funders who handed him millions to spend building this. Perhaps someone else would have stepped into that sweaty, reckless-grifter-shaped hole if Ton-That hadn't been there to fill it, but in our timeline, we can say that Ton-That was the bumbler who helped destroy something precious.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

[charadriusnivosus]

Lower Antelope Canyon 🏞️ Page, AZ

[merf-txt]

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[brotherdusk]

incredibly specific to me grumble but I thought I'd left the pain of bastard pliés behind when I put dance on hold and took up karate instead. but the fiendish kokutsu dachi,

[nando161mando]

Announcing: A Field Guide to Police Surveillance!

We've updated and overhauled our Street Level Surveillance hub so it has all the basic facts you need to know about the 16 most common types/categories of surveillance that local PDs use.

[theendofmybody]

so age verification laws have made it to my state, meaning that if websites containing ≥33% porn (including basic nudity) dont implement a strict age verification process they could be sued for the damages caused by exposing minors to sexual material, in other states this verification process involves using one's government issued id. and i am so beyond pissed that "protecting the children" only ever means protecting them from nudity or knowledge of sex when theres so much genuinely harmful bigotry and misinformation on the internet.

[rpschtuff]

If your custom theme isn't showing up...

Go to your blog settings. Make sure "Enable custom theme" is turned ON.

Then make sure "Hide from people without an account" is turned OFF.

This switch locks your blog into dash only (and really should have a warning on it).

[captain-acab]

#yes!!! my partner has a framework!!! and honestly once my current computer breaks (eventually) I'll get one too

(via @salix-triandra)

I've seen Framework recommended a lot in the notes of this post, but this is the first one I've actually found where the blogger actually OWNS one (or presumably lives with someone who owns).

Sure it's a nifty-looking tech startup, but the actual details seem uninspired.

Don't get me wrong, they put a big emphasis on sustainability and repairaability, and that's great! But when it comes to longevity/upgradability, I notice three things:

There's still ultimately only a couple form factors for the laptop body itself. None of them include anything interesting like a card reader, let alone an optical drive.

All the "revolutionary" upgradeable internals like motherboard and GPU, as well as replaceable externals like keyboard and numpad, can only be replaced with Framework's own version of that component; it's not compatible with any off-the-shelf GPU, the way a desktop PC would be. Now, this is not unusual for name-brand laptops! But unlike the name-brands, there's no guarantee this little Framework company will still exist in 5 years, let alone 10.

The big selling point, swappable external ports, are literally just low-profile USB-C adapters. That's it.

Also, it's a pet peeve of mine when folks recommend Linux to basic users. Sorry, it's not comparable. I'm an experienced power user, and I still find Linux unnecessarily confusing. It's not "building your own seat with a nifty manual," it's

"build a seat with 30 different manuals, half of them for different flavors of your seat than you have, and all of them written with the assumption that you have an aerospace engineering degree. Did you make your seat? Great! Wait, there's no cupholder. You can install the recommended one, but it actually doesn't fit with your armrest because it hasn't been update in 15 years. Ok, how about a headrest? Nope, headrests are only made for Windows and Mac. Maybe you can emulate a headrest in a virtual Windows seat and hope it works? (Then why didn't you buy a cheap Windows seat to begin with?) Whatever, let's just make your seat recline. Step 1: Bash in the cockpit door and gain root access to the entire plane,"

You know what, fuck it, I don't *want* some frivolous, artisanal, lighter-than-air computer with no customizability, no upgradeability, no reparability, no ports, and a lifetime of *maybe* 3 years if you're lucky. I want a fucking great BEAST of a computer that's designed to last a minimum of 50 years, with ports up the wazoo and optional drives for every kind of media! I want modular components that you can drop in a bog for a year, dry them off, and have them still work fine! I want them to make a noise like "ker-chunk!" when you slide them into place! I want a switch that you pull to turn it on! And I don't want software that constantly forces you to get a pointless, cosmetic "upgrade" every few months either! I want durability! I want longevity! I want satisfying haptics! I want Silicon Valley to go fuck itself!

[rxttencaviar]

we think ultimately the difference between there being. um. multiple of us. and the voices we hear. is that it's the difference between someone living in the same house and talking to someone on the phone. one of these has a lot more material impact and sway in what happens and how. and a lot more arguing about doing chores.

[aitechtonicinfo]

Unhide Apps on an iPhone: Guide

In today’s digital age, privacy and personalization are key components of the smartphone experience. Apple has equipped the iPhone with powerful features to help users manage how and where apps appear on their device. Whether you’re hiding apps to declutter your Home Screen or to ensure privacy from prying eyes, it’s important to know how to unhide those apps when needed. If you’ve ever hidden…

[kopfconsulting]

Google Domains has officially been acquired by Squarespace, and domain migrations are underway. Understand your options, why choosing the right registrar matters, and how to ensure a smooth domain transfer process without downtime.

[wankatours]

[venniekocsis]

The Energetic Sovereignty of the Natural Telepath

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[jarlhalla]

Cyber Security Awareness

Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1. Overview of Online Marketplaces in Cybercrime 1.2. Importance of Understanding AlphaBay and Wildlife Trade 1.3. Aim and Structure of the Article Chapter 2. AlphaBay Market Takeover and Activities 2.1. Department of Justice Takedown Announcement 2.2. Financial Impact and Scale of AlphaBay 2.3. Paul Craig’s Insights on Illegal E-commerce Chapter 3. Illegal Goods and…