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January 25, 2020 04:56 pm PST

The answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not anti-scraping laws

Clearview AI (previously) is a grifty facial recognition company that sells untested, secretive tools to police departments, claiming that they can identify people from security camera footage by matching the pictures those scraped from big social media sites.

It turns out -- unsurprisingly -- that Clearview's marketing copy is not a reliable source of impartial evidence about the quality of its products, and neither are the testimonials of the cops who urged their bosses to buy Clearview products.

Nevertheless, Clearview is a creepy, grifty, privacy-invading toolsmith serving authoritarians, getting rich by covertly supplying its overhyped tools, and, unsurprisingly, lots of people (including me) want structural changes to make Clearview cut it out and prevent future Clearviews from emerging.

However, the remedy that's favored by the Big Tech monopolists that Clearview used for raw materials is to ban scraping, something that Big Tech has been aggressively seeking to criminalize. The problems with this is that scraping bans represent the best hope monopolists have for maintaining their monopolies: if it's against the law to extract your own data from a Facebook walled garden, then Facebook doesn't need to fear that a competitor will create a tool that will let you stay in touch with your Facebook friends without using Facebook (by logging into Facebook as you, scraping your waiting messages, and letting you reply without touching Facebook yourself).

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- a federal hacking statute from 1986! -- is the preferred tool for blocking scraping (it's the law that was used to threaten Aaron Swartz with a long prison sentence after he wrote a tool that mass-downloaded scientific articles he was entitled to read from MIT's network). Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/WX_3WxvgSs4/clearview-analytica.html

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