Today’s links Kashmir Hill’s “Your Face Belongs to Us”: A candid, whistleblower-informed history of Clearview AI. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Kashmir Hill’s “Your Face Belongs to Us” (permalink) Your Face Belongs To Us is Kashmir Hill’s new tell-all history of Clearview AI, the creepy facial recognition company whose origins are mired in far-right politics, off-the-books police misconduct, sales to authoritarian states and sleazy one-percenter one-upmanship: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/your-face-belongs-to-us-by-kashmir-hill/ Hill is a fitting chronicler here. Clearview first rose to prominence – or, rather, notoriety – with the publication of her 2020 expose on the company, which had scraped more than a billion facial images from the web, and then started secretly marketing a search engine for faces to cops, spooks, private security firms, and, eventually, repressive governments: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html Hill’s original blockbuster expose was followed by an in-depth magazine feature and then a string more articles, which revealed the company’s origins in white nationalist movements, and the mercurial jourey of its founder, Hoan Ton-That: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/facial-recognition-clearview-ai.html The story of Clearview’s technology is an interesting one, a story about the machine learning gold-rush where modestly talented technologists who could lay hands on sufficient data could throw it together with off-the-shelf algorithms and do things that had previously been considered impossible. While Clearview has plenty of competitors today, as recently as a couple of years ago, it played like a magic trick. That’s where the…Pluralistic: Kashmir Hill's "Your Face Belongs to Us" (20 Sept 2023)