The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Clearview AI Facial Recognition – The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Clearview AI Facial Recognition - The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It Clearview AI Facial Recognition - The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show Podcast. Hey guys, welcome to the Chris Voss Show Podcast. I've been taking a little time off because we posted like, I don't know, 25 or something interviews from CES, booth interviews, CEO interviews, suite interviews from the suites. Not just the booth interviews those are important but we also did the sweet interviews not sweet as in s-w-e-e-t stop it you uh you sugar freaks you uh no sweet as in like taste not tasty no not tasty see you look see what you did to me anyway we went to ces holy crap 2020 uh we had a great year at ces really incredible uh if you missed it make sure you go back through the podcast

and check out i don't know the last 30 episodes of us talking about ces uh some of the great episodes were uh gary, the CEO and president of CTA, which is the trade association that oversees and puts on CES show. If you don't know, learn something new here. I went to the show for years and did not know that. I always just thought he put on the CES show and that was his job. I didn't understand the whole dynamic, but that's okay. I always covered it because it was fun and interesting and Gary does a hell of a job. So if you get a chance to watch his interview,

I think it's his second year on the show right before CES and I appreciate him coming by and sharing his insight. And of course you can see his wonderful books on Amazon.com. I think his latest book that we interviewed him on last year just came out on Paperbook, so you can check that out. What else do we have? Holy shit, there was so much from the show. So many great sponsors, Gifter app. You've got to check out this app, this Gifter app.

It's a Gift3R app the three x is an e and so we got a chance to see them um and uh they're one of the sponsors of the chris foss show and i gotta tell you these guys have an app that's pretty awesome um if i can just plug it here for a second it's kind of like yelp it's uh for consumers and businesses so if you're a restaurant and you want to you know you go to that stupid gift card thing at the store. There's like 50,000 gift cards and there's never the one you want. You got to go to another store to see if they have the gift card you want. And it's only big chain stuff.

It's never like Main Street players. So they make this app that's disrupting all that, which is pretty darn brilliant. I wish I thought of it. But they're making this wonderful app that businesses can put on gift cards to sell stuff. And then consumers can go on and buy and trade the gift cards. And what's really nice is you can trade gift cards. Have you ever gotten a gift card to, like, I don don't know let's say that you're a vegan you know some of your family gives you like a you know barbecue place ribs ribs joint and you're like i'm never eating there so what are you going to do with that gift card so what you do is you

by giving it virtual on the gifter app gift 3r app you can uh re-gift that baby. Just re-gift it, and you don't have to do anything. You don't have to mail it to them. You don't have to. Like, one of the things I hate about giving gifts to people when it comes to gift cards is you've got to call them up and be like, hey, man, what's your address or your Amazon email or, you know, what's your mailing address?

When you call somebody and and stuff you got to ask them that information it's like sometimes a real creeper like you're like what's your address man um and then they know it's coming it's not a surprise gift anymore and then they're like you're sending me what uh well there goes the surprise remember the remember when you were a kid you get surprised you know unless you're like oh she got into the bed so now let's move on uh we're gonna do tech news on a separate podcast uh so watch for that and check that out but today we're just going to talk about one thing well we already talked about a couple things ch Chris. What are you talking about, Chris? We're going to talk about one thing that just blew my freaking mind.

Now, if you're familiar with the 1984 book, it's called 1984 by George Orwell, I believe. I almost said Orson Welles there for a second. What was that about? George Orwell wrote this book on 1984 about big brother and a nude, uh, was dystopian society. Is that correct? Um, where everyone is on cameras and monitored and you know, everything is monitored. We're seeing, of course, you've been seeing this, um, play out in China where I believe it's the Jingping. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Uh, air area where they're repressing Muslims and putting them in tournament camps, which is very crazy.

But all of their society, they're building these facial recognition picture cameras that know your age, they know what you're doing. Like if you're, they limit you, if, you know, they catch you buying too much alcohol, they go, oh, that person has a problem. And then they limit your ability to travel and stuff. And it gives you like a social credit score that once you kind of go in the toilet with it, maybe you protest too much or do some bad things they catch you on camera with too much, it affects your whole life like you can't move you can't leave your area um it's fucking crazy dude so uh the big worry is is

when is this going to come to america and when are we going to become enslaved by these algorithms ai and uh sort of new camera work that's being done. And, you know, we've seen different things of this that we find out about later. Edward Snowden, of course, alerted us to a lot of stuff that was going on with their cell phones. It turns out that's not so much even the problem anymore. The New York Times, if you get a chance, go to newyorktimes.com. There's a great article, holy crap, by Kashmir Hill that was published on January 18th, 2020. You've got to read this freaking article and share it and educate people on what's going on. Holy crap. I remember years ago seeing how the Oakland police and a lot of police departments, but I guess the Oakland police were just really just ramrodding the system in San Francisco.

And they mount this thing on their cars that as the police car drives down the road, it takes pictures and does searches of license plates. And then if you have like warrants or, you know, tickets or some sort of issue or registrations, you know, it just, it just turns into a, a, a revenue crime. It's not revenue, revenue crimes, not the right word for it. It turns into a revenue crime money-making machine. I hate towns that make money off of these, uh, uh, off of revenue crimes, speeding and all this kind of crap. Because technically it targets the poor, and traditionally it's very racial because it targets the poor and people that are oppressed in racial areas, if you will. So it just makes the life of the poor even poorer i remember growing up as a kid being poor and um and constantly having speeding tickets and just

turn signal tickets in utah i mean utah was a police state still is it's just crazy they they pull you over for anything here in in utah um especially when if you have a car that looks like it's not you know car, I suppose. I don't know. I had three different BMWs in the state for about 15 years, and I was always getting pulled over, I suppose, by jealous cops. But I was speeding, so I'll give you that. But the speed traps are everywhere, and this is how they make their revenue.

It's plain knowledge that this is one of the ways they pay for their things. Anyway, the New York times published this article like i say that you need to freaking read because this has just gone to a whole new level in fact uh uh you know it's it's pretty crazy uh this is a startup that they found and the new york times did some great reporting here because they had to really dig these guys hid their thing and it's a gentleman i hopefully i pronounce this correctly he's called hon ton that's um and that's his name mr ton that ton dash that he's an australian techie and one-time model. And he basically ended your ability to walk down the street anonymously and provide it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from top cops in Florida to the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security. He has a tiny company called Clearview AI, and it's devised a groundbreaking facial recognition

app. You take a picture of a person, you upload it, and you get to see public photos of that person, along with links as to where the photos appeared. And it's a backbone of a database with more than 3 billion, I said billion, images that Clearview claims have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other websites. And it goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants. I'm quoting here from the article from the New York Times, by the way.

And you'll find me doing that throughout this podcast because they lay it out in very stark terms that are very direct. And federal and state law enforcements said, well, they have limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who's behind it. They've been using the app to help shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder, and child sexual exploitation cases. Now, this is pretty awesome for child exploitation and murder and fraud and you know finding thieves and stuff but it's highly questionable how they've come across this data all of these websites that

they've scraped from they've literally scraped it from now given this these are your public profiles on Facebook and stuff but where they've scraped from, most of these websites do not allow this sort of scraping to go on. So it's kind of interesting if Facebook or Google are going to deal with these people in any sort of way. And these people know what they're doing, and they know it's a problem because even in, like, San Francisco, they have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

They see what's happening in China and they realize the problem with it. And of course, 1984 was a precursor to this as well. So without any public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using the Clearview AI in the past year, according to the company. And they hid a lot from the New York Times. They dogged the crap out of them. The New York Times, like I said, did great reporting.

They've licensed its app to a handful of companies for security purposes as well. They basically weaponized the possibilities of facial recognition that are endless, according to Eric Goldman, co-director of High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners or a foreign government who uses this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail. Basically what it does is it's scraped all your facial recognition from all your faces

and all your data from all these public websites that you've been on. And it makes it so that the law enforcement or anyone really who uses the app can take a picture of your face or get a picture of your face off Facebook. They can put the face into the app, and what it does is it goes through its database of all the collection it's scraped, the billions of faces it has. It finds all the matches to your face.

Regardless of angle, they've developed some pretty good AI. No matter which way your face is turned, it can figure out that it's your face. They've done actually some pretty brilliant work on mathematics and distance between eyes and eyebrows and how your face works, basically mapping out your face in a mathematics sort of sense. But here's the crazy thing is once it identifies your face in its database, it can give whoever is looking for this, all of the websites that you're on

and all of the places that your faces recognition came from. So within an instant or a very short time, I can put your face in, like, say I'm a stalker of say someone, and I want to find out, you know, how to find out everything about them or even scarier. What if I was a pedophile and trying to, you know, find where a kid lives and stuff? I mean, I've done this. We've done these sort of discussions on the Chris Voss Show where smart parents will take off the EXIF data on their location data for their photos because they'll, you know, they post their photos, you know, creepy pedophiles and start hunting them down. In fact, I think we talked a few

last month, we talked about a, um, a company that busts this sort of thing. And they, they post like they basically do the Chris Hansen thing. They post, uh, decoys that are adults, but they look like children. They, and they shoot them and frame them like children so that they um so they appeal to these guys and within seconds of posting these these uh child photos on it like instagram or anything they're suddenly hit up by pedophiles it's just it's just the most insane thing ever i'm so glad i don't have children and my brain would just melt um Um, just being paranoid about their safety at all times. Um, probably cause I know how evil the internet is. So, uh, anyway, getting

back to, uh, where I, uh, segue it off of the, uh, so that you can put their photo in so they can see everywhere you are so they can see your YouTube, they can see your thing. Now, if you're a terrorist or you're an evil person, this like a great thing if you're a criminal uh this seems like a great thing they can put your face in let's say they've got some guy and they don't know who he is he just shows up on a security cam robbing a bank and they're like uh put this in and then suddenly it's like well here's this guy's youtube here's his facebook and here's his twitter and all this shit that seems like a great thing and that seems kind of awesome but here's the problem who watches the watchers who regulates the regulators and that's where power corrupts and that's where

abuses take place uh if you've studied or listened or read ed Snowden's book, you've heard him talk about how the, the coworkers of his at the NSA would, would target hot chicks, hot wives, you know, tagging their cameras. They share photos, you know,

they collect them. You know, they weren't just sitting around being like, we're doing the astute, upstanding work of the U government here you know sometimes the human nature of perviness would kick in probably more times than not I don't know I don't want to speak for the NSA I'm sure there's a lot of good people that work there but you know what I mean there's always that group of people that they're just gonna make

anything bad so who watches the Watchers? And, in fact, we didn't know about this. So Clearview shrouded itself in secrecy, according to the New York Times. And this reporter looked into them in November. And the website actually is just a bare page. And it shows a non-existent manhattan address as a place of business the company's one employee listed on linkedin is a sales manager named john good who turned out to be the ceo mr ton that using a fake name and for a month people affiliated with the company wouldn't return the reporters emails or phone calls and so the meantime he got with the police officers in Florida and, uh, had them

using the app. And then this is the creepy thing. As soon as the, um, as soon as the, uh, um, at the, the police officers showed on the app and showed the reporter how the app worked, they started getting phone calls from the companies, the police officers, saying, are you talking to the media? So they have the ability to monitor what's going on with the app and how law enforcement is using it

and how to know when prying eyes are trying to find out what the fuck is going on. You know, look, if you're running a company that you have to post a fake website with a fake address and and you're faking your name employees on the thing you you might be doing something that yeah i'm not sure wrong is the right word maybe unethical so certainly a lot of people in the in the business and they quote some of these people feel that, uh, self-regulation of this sort of facial recognition AI is, is probably come to an end in time for legislation. And sadly, you know, our, our experience with legislators is they wait until it gets way out of hand you know like i remember when uh what was it shame uh shame porn ex-girlfriend

shame porn was getting huge on the internet and it had to get really freaking bad before legislators finally went we should bring it we make this illegal it's like holy crap man first time i heard about it i was like that should be illegal like now before it gets really out of hand i think by the time i heard it was out of hand so um anyway um to make this story even more interesting clearview was found by richard schwartz who was an aide to rudolph giuliani when he was mayor and backed financially by peter teal the venture capitalist behind facebook and palantir. So, you know, wonderful group of ethical folks there. And, yeah, they're basically, you know, claiming it's for crime solving, but these guys have built a huge database and they're hiding it.

And, yeah, bring us to a dystopian future if you will so this guy this 31 year old mr ton that has created this uh uh app and um using selling the police departments and they're making just a killing financially uh the monthly fees that they charge are pretty extraordinary. And they charge, of course, depending upon how big the law enforcement is. And, well, I give you, it's got to be good for whatever. But, you know, I honestly think that maybe a judge should be overseeing some of this stuff. Like a judge should be able to say, yeah, okay, here's the thing. If you go to the judge and say, Judge, we need to search for this person, can you give us the authorization to put this in?

You know, there needs to be some sort of oversight here. That's all I'm saying. There really needs to be some sort of oversight here because this isn't good, man. This isn't good. I mean, do you want some stalker, some ex-husband, some ex-boyfriend, um, you know, stalking your stuff and, uh, stalking your stuff. It sounds like Christmas or something. Stalking your stuffing, your stocking full of Christmas

gifts, uh, all the opposite. Uh, so anyway, um, the, uh, uh, yeah, so they've been working on this since 2017. It's been really tiny, quiet, and just going through its thing. And they're just killing it. According to the article, in February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting with Clearview. They solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app. Two men had gotten in a fight in a park and ended with one shot in the stomach. A bystander recorded the crime on the phone, so the police had a still of the guns in his face.

And they immediately got a match, found his match on social media. And so they, I guess it turns out he didn't have a driver's license, hadn't been arrested as an adult, so he wasn't in government databases. So they found him, and they charged him, and social media was the thing that gave him up. So it's pretty interesting. It's pretty interesting what they're doing here. And I don't know, man.

It's kind of scary. I mean, it's basically this um it's basically this who watches the watchers and it's kind of creepy when uh they start noticing that the uh you know they're getting calls from a new york times reporter they're getting emails and then suddenly they're matching with their database that some cops in flor are showing the app to the thing. Doesn't that seem kind of creepy? Like, we know you're watching us. Now we're watching you.

And I guess that's what they did. So it turns out, with the Los Angeles Police Department, they have a database of about 8 million faces. With Florida police, they have 47 million faces, because it's Florida. And then with the FBI, they have 411 million faces because uh it's florida uh uh and then uh with the fbi they have 411 million faces but with clearview you can search 3 billion faces now i don't know how ethical this was what they did where they scraped from facebook youtube uh all these different places because technically this is against the Facebook TOS so it's definitely interesting as to how it goes there sometimes they're able to complete old dead-end cases I don't know and basically and they've even tapped into surveillance cameras too so they're

trying to use that they're trying to just build the biggest database that they can so I don't know where this goes what it means who oversees the who watches the watchers who knows what's going on there should be disclosures this is of course one of those things where I remember years ago Mark Zuckerberg knew at the time and he admitted to it and everybody, he caught shit for it. Cause everyone was like, yeah, privacy's not dead. And he's like, you guys just have no idea what's going on, but you'll wake up someday. And we, we kind of started to with Edward Snowden. And, uh, now we're starting to with

this other stuff. Privacy is dead. I mean mean i have some people that think they're really smart because they're like i put i put january 1 as my birthday that's the dumbest thing ever if you don't think every credit card you have and every bank you have account doesn't report to a credit bureau what your true birthday is you're an idiot um's just, I've seen so many people do the most dumbest things thinking they're hiding their privacy and they're really not the best way to hide your privacy is to never take out a loan, never buy a house, never take out a credit card, um, never buy a phone or own a phone. That's always a good thing because the phone gives you away all day. But, I mean, seriously, you still need a driver's license,

so you're in someone's database somewhere. And most driver's license agencies sell access to that database and the data. So there's just really no way around it. The only thing you need to do is to cut yourself off from everything and move to, you know montana uh cabin in the fucking woods with a typewriter and shit and don't bomb people don't be that unabomber guy um you know that's about the only way so anyway that's kind of an interesting article i want to cover it for you guys and want to share it with you i think you should go read it and you

should go share it, please. Not that I'm against people being busted that are criminals. I'm all for that. But, again, who watches the watchers? Who oversees people? Any bad cop can use this to go after ex-lovers, go after ex-boyfriends, whatever. One of my friends recently, and I'm not bashing cops here. Cops are wonderful people. They do a great job for us. And, you know, largely most of the time they're good, but it's the bad apples that make every batch of apples rotten. So, you know, one of my

friends recently, she dated a police officer and kind of found he was a narcissist and broke up with him. And he started doing stalking stuff to her. Bad shit. And I think that sometimes if you feel that you have the badge, you can kind of pull some bad shit. Because, I mean, who's going to arrest you? The police? Who are you going to call? Us?

And so I guess he pulled some shit on her. And some stalkery shit and some damaged goods and different things. I won't go into it because I don't want to disclose who it is. But basically he did some evil shit. And, you know, this is a case where what do you do? What do you do? You call the cops and you're like, hey, man, your friend in the blue line there did some stuff to me. And they're like, yeah, sure. He's with us. That's in the blue line there uh he did some stuff to me and they're like yeah sure he's with us um that's in blue line um and who watches the watchers man and so you could see something like

this becoming really bad um and not not being held in the most high ethical standards anyway go check it out it's the new york times it was published on 118 2020 by cash mere hill cashmere hill and uh i i to me this is the must read article of the month year whatever i mean there's a lot of bullshit you can read but this is fucking crazy and the fact they're trying to hide and not get noticed uh while recruiting our police departments just scares the hell out of me and the fact that there's no oversight there's no ethics you know facial recognition really needs an ethical oversight body we need to have a body that oversees this stuff I don't know if officially

it would be a government agency but we need something that would oversee uh the ethics and this sort of thing and the morality of it and uh what's what's happening with our data and everything else we need to start doing some of this stuff and i think the government doesn't want to get involved because the government um the government basically you know they're using this i mean if you have read edward stoneman's books or seen anything he said the government doesn't want to regulate this because they're like, because then we'd be regulated too and we'd do whatever the hell we want. Anyway, it's something that should be a concern to every American, especially when you want freedom,

because these are how freedoms get eroded over time and how you lose freedom. And I think we all need to be concerned about this. I hope Facebook and Google might engage these people in a lawsuit or deal with some sort of way because scraping their images was not something I signed up on Facebook for. Maybe that's in the TOS. I don't know. I haven't read it like you. So there you go.

Hey, guys, we're going to move to news and some other topics on another episode of our podcast. So I'll wrap this one up. But please, please read this thing. Understand how your images are being used. This is your data. This is your information. This is your face.

And someday it may not be. And people are doing evil shit with that stuff between, you know, these fake videos where they can make it look like you say just about anything you want and ruin your future and life. Um, it's very scary, man. So be sure to check that out. Read the article, the secret of company that might end privacy as we know it as the title. And, uh, it's this company, uh, that I'm sure we're going to hear a lot more about as they've kind of start to become uncovered. uncovered um clear view

ai anyway guys thanks for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys be sure to give some good referrals to show we appreciate when you post those on itunes and thanks for tuning in