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February 10, 2020: Voices in tech 3: facial recognition, anti-competitive Big Tech giants, & a robot

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Tonight: Voices in tech 3: facial recognition, anti-competitive Big Tech giants, & a robot

• City boots creepy ‘coronavirus-detecting’ robot from Bryant Park (NYPost, Feb 6)

• Hearing on facial recognition: House Oversight Committee, Jan 15, 2020 - feat. AOC, Meredith Whittaker (AI Now Institute), Daniel Castro (from the IT and Innovation Foundation, funded by Google, IBM, Cisco, and others - and whose board includes execs from Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, Intuit, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Apple), and Jake Parker (Security Industry Association).

• Hearing on anti-competitive Big Tech behavior: House Judiciary Committee, Jan 17, 2020 - feat. Rep. David Cicilline and Basecamp cofounder David Heinemeier Hansson. Video here (YouTube, ugh)... and WaPo article here.

Items for today:

• The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It (by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times, Jan 18, 2020): "Clearview AI devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants."

• ...listen also: The Daily podcast, featuring Kashmir Hill, on the Clearview story (Feb 10, 2020)

• ...see also: Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Is Identifying Child Victims of Abuse (NYT, Feb 7) and Clearview AI is looking to expand globally, report says (CNet, Feb 5): "The facial recognition company reportedly wants to sell its app to law enforcement in 22 more countries." ... and Business Insider: Clearview AI, the controversial company building a searchable database of peoples' faces, is reportedly planning a 'rapid international expansion' that includes countries with documented human rights abuses.

• ...see also: Clearview AI Says Its Facial Recognition Software Identified A Terrorism Suspect. The Cops Say That's Not True. (Jan 23, 2020): "While it’s common for startups to make exaggerated claims, the stakes are much higher for a company building tools used by police to identify criminal suspects. 'There has to be some personal or professional responsibility here,' said Liz O’Sullivan, an artificial intelligence researcher and the technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. 'The consequences of a false positive is that someone goes to jail.'" [Liz O'Sullivan is a past guest.]

• A startup that scraped billions of photos from Facebook and Google to create a facial-recognition database was just sent a cease-and-desist by Google and YouTube (NYT, Feb 5): "Twitter, Google, and YouTube say that [Clearview] violates their terms of service agreements, and all three have sent cease-and- desist letters to the company."

• Facial Recognition Moves Into a New Front: Schools (NYT, Feb 6): "In April, Assemblywoman Monica Wallace, a Democrat from Lancaster, introduced a bill that would force Lockport to halt the use of facial recognition for a year while the State Education Department studied the technology. . . . She said school districts could, for instance, take smaller steps like upgrading entrances and exits, hiring school resource officers, and investing in counselors and social workers."

• NYPD pushes back against facial recognition ban (NYPost, Feb 2): "A state lawmaker’s call for the ban of police’s use of facial recognition is facing unsurprising public push back from New York City law enforcement... 'That proposal up in Albany is insane,' former police commissioner Bill Bratton said... Being quite frank with you, I don’t think they know much about facial recognition or the current state of it.'"

• Convenience Chain Adds Facial Recognition at More Portland Stores (RedTail Media, Jan 27, 2020): "Convenience retail chain Jacksons Food Stores now requires approval by facial recognition to enter two additional stores in Portland, Oregon and has plans to add the technology at another Tacoma, Washington store."

Long reads

• Caught in the Spotlight (Chris Gilliard in Urban Omnibus, Jan 9, 2020): "Consider what we might call 'luxury surveillance,' in contrast with 'imposed surveillance.' These categories call attention to who gets to decide how surveillance works for them and who is left little room for choice. Luxury surveillance is expensive, voluntary, and sleek (yet often meant to be noticed). Imposed surveillance is involuntary, overt, clunky, and meant to stand out."

• The Rise Of Smart Camera Networks, And Why We Should Ban Them (The Intercept, Jan 27)

From last week

...carried over from last week...

• Google Maps Hacks by Simon Weckert, 2020. Simon writes (Feb 1): "99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route!" (And past Techtonic guest Roger McNamee writes: "Google Maps uses load balancing to keep traffic moving smoothly, which means you may be sent on an inferior route so it moves smoothly for most people. People are fighting back with hacks, creating virtual traffic jams.")

• Here Are the Most Common Airbnb Scams Worldwide (Jan 31): "Nearly 1,000 people flooded our inbox with their stories. We found some patterns." Bait and switch, plumbing scams, money scams, fake damages, running out the clock until refund window expires, and on and on and on.

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