The photos of all of us have been amassed to create a massive database. A photo of our face can be submitted and it will return (claimed 99% accuracy) information about each of us and all photos of us they have found online, even back to when we were kids.

According to Ton-That, Clearview has downloaded billions of images from major social media platforms and from all different kinds of websites across the internet — including, evidently, from my local newspaper.

Downloading and storing pictures this way is against most of the major social media platforms’ policies.The practice has prompted the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to send Clearview cease-and-desist letters.

Source: Clearview AI’s Hoan Ton-That says he’s stockpiling billions of our photos – CNN

Clearview is available only to law enforcement.

Since my photos are marked copyright, if they have my photos, they are violating my copyright, which they have made clear, they don’t care about. The article says they have already scraped everything – if you mark your photos “private” later, it doesn’t matter. They have them and they will not delete them. Also, if they have  photos of children they may be violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

Unfortunately, it will take lawsuits to change this and few people have the resources to file suit.

We live in a police state with 24 x 7 surveillance of every thing we do – every time we travel with our smart phone, our location is tracked and shared with numerous third parties. Every time we purchase something online – or offline – our purchase is logged in a database and may be shared with Facebook. Our faces are scanned by cameras and we are identified as we travel about. If our cell phone crosses paths – in public – with someone who is being tracked, we then become a suspect. The government maintains a data base of every airline flight you have ever taken (and may record other data in that database). The FAA has proposed a system of “Remote identification” of drone aircraft that, per their proposal, requires all drones to be connected to an Internet database, in real time, and specifically says they may record and store aerial imagery and “telemetry”, which could include WiFi signals as they fly over your backyard. Our email (like GMail) was previously analyzed by software, ostensibly to learn our interests for the purpose of marketing. By “analyzed” we mean that AI-driven software analyzed our text, roughly equivalent to someone reading all of our email, taking notes, and then using their interpretation for their purposes.

There is generally no opportunity for any of us to review what has been collected or to request correction, deletion or suspension of that data collection.

Total information surveillance is now here.