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firehawk1115 t1_jdzrn6k wrote

Reply to comment by danger_davis in BBC News: Clearview AI used nearly 1m times by US police, it tells the BBC by Gigglemind

I guess it depends on where Clearview gets the photos. If they scrape from the internet and someone didn't 100% give them permission they probably wouldnt want Clearview to have them and by extension the police.

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DigitalArbitrage t1_jdzvvll wrote

They were the lowest bidder on a government contract to provide face scanning to sign in for filing federal taxes. Basically every adult in the U.S. would have been required to give them face scans if civil liberty groups hadn't pushed back on it.

For decades police in some states (e.g. Florida) have also been using databases of driver's license photos to search for fugitives.

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worldofzero t1_je09byu wrote

Clearview scrapes online info and will not let you remove yourself from their database without giving them your gov I'd. If you or your friends use social media and share pictures your in your database and there is nothing you can do about it. They're ethically a black hole.

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Iohet t1_je0lbwo wrote

If they're publicly accessible on the internet, I don't think it really matters. You don't need a warrant to look at someone's public Facebook, but you do to get to their private messages.

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bshepp t1_je13eqk wrote

Posting something that is accessible to the public doesn't automatically make it public and posting something publicly doesn't necessarily give anyone the right to copy it, use it, or make derivative works from it.

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Iohet t1_je1ycpv wrote

If you're trying to argue that you should be able to issue a DMCA Takedown, then by all means try that route, but as far as complying with the 4th amendment, public is public, and if you give something to an intermediary, the 4th amendment rights are the intermediary's rights, not your rights.

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bshepp t1_je2187x wrote

If you leave your house unlocked does that mean your house is now a public space? That is the point I am trying to make. Uploading something to the web does not necessarily make it public. It's entirely possible they used entirely public resources in this instance. Again I'm just saying accessable to the public doesn't necessarily mean it is in the public.

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Iohet t1_je2210o wrote

Yea, but the door is open. Plain view doctrine. As far as Facebook goes, it's based on reasonable expectation of privacy. The courts have found that private messages have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but not public posts. They can't get into items locked behind your user in your account without a warrant, but publicly posted things are fair game

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Plenty_Branch_516 t1_je238ip wrote

Yeah, you're right. Law is clear here. Is it just? Probably not, but law strays often from such course.

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Iohet t1_je27ow8 wrote

I'm not even sure it's not just. If you publicly post something that ties you to an illegal activity, that's on you. If you privately post something, you're afforded some level of privacy, but, again, once you give it to Facebook, they're the ones served the warrant, not you, and they don't give a shit about you enough to fight it. So, really, just don't do it.

Absolutely push your legislators to ban this type of data collection, but, in absence of that, just because new methods of accessing old public data are better doesn't mean the concept is no longer just, and one should be aware of that before they say anything that could hurt them

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bananafobe t1_je3bchy wrote

>If you publicly post something that ties you to an illegal activity, that's on you.

I think this is part of the issue. It's not necessarily posting photos of yourself committing crimes, but rather a potentially flawed program using a database of unrelated photos to link you to a crime that you may have had nothing to do with.

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Plenty_Branch_516 t1_je29c0e wrote

"Just" short for justice is a finicky concept. As technology improves what can be considered the boundary for privacy begins to falter.

In a photo someone else posted? Your privacy is gone. Connect to public wifi? Your privacy is gone. Ping off a cell tower? Your privacy is gone. One of your relatives use ancestry.com? They can trace you to any DNA found even if you aren't in a criminal database.

Point being, you are not in control of your privacy. Far from it.

One doesn't need to give permission to join the pool of public data. In fact it requires significant effort to avoid it and in rare cases retract information added to it. A right to privacy is usually considered just. However, as our technology improves and it becomes easier to link disparate sources of data together, that right to privacy is eroded. Potentially even sold for a pitiful sum.

Don't get me wrong though. It's all a net good. For most of us, privacy is an incredibly cheap price to pay for the boons we are getting in science and technology.

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