[salawat]

The funny thing is that you can't really opt out if the mechanism they use to tell their system to ignore you is in and of itself facial recognition based.

They'd have to crawl all incoming data, and compare it with you (I.e. identifying you) in order to know whether or not that picture they just slurped up was someone who had opted out. Opt-outs don't work by definition when what you are opting out of is a system of identification.

The fact of the matter is, the system shouldn't have been made in the first place,and the mere existence of it guarantees the capability for it to be abused.

[Nav_Panel]

> the system shouldn't have been made in the first place,and the mere existence of it guarantees the capability for it to be abused

I casually know the guys who made this, and they're, well, unorthodox thinkers in terms of ethics. I highly doubt that, say, government regulations would've prevented them from building this app (although it may prevent them from using it in certain regions).

It's very hard to put neural network and image recognition tools into public hands and also prevent anyone in the world from building something like this. Such is the Pandora's Box of technology.

[buildbot]

You can't prevent it from being built, but you can prevent people making a profit on it

[Nav_Panel]

You can prevent people from making a profit on it... in the legal marketplace*, in the US/EU†.

You don't think people would pay serious crypto for access to this? Or that states with different "ethics" wouldn't pay for it?

[buildbot]

Oh absolutely - Considering what clearview did was replicated by a few individual researchers, I'm sure any government or private entity that wants to build s system like this has.

But I think most people here would fight against those systems once discovered, and there's no reason to allow clearview to profit now.

[carapace]

This. Just as every obscenity filter has to have a list of obscenities to work, these creepy bastards will track you to not-track you.

We need laws. (Or just let everybody know everything: "Privacy is dead".)

[TomMarius]

How will laws help against the same thing, but made by unlawful people? I think it's better to accept that privacy in the classic sense is dead and adjust.

[xtian]

Perhaps we could have a group of people whose job it is to investigate and prosecute unlawful behavior.

[TomMarius]

Luckily we already have such group - but they need tools like this to be efficient against the unlawful people wielding that technology. What now?

[samoa42]

they dont need to be efficient, but effective. likewise the enforcers of law must not act unlawful.

[TomMarius]

In my native language, it's the same word. I meant it as both.

[xtian]

No they don't.

[carapace]

I think then the issue becomes what you might call differential privacy. Do the rich and powerful get to opt out? That kind of thing.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

Well if you legally have to be able to opt out, and they can't opt you out without completely reworking their business, then legally it seems like they should have to rework their business if you opt out. I'd call that a functioning opt out, even though I expect I'm being unrealistically optimistic :(