Opinion | We Need a Law to Save Us From Dystopia

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We Need a Law to Save Us From Dystopia

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Over the long weekend, my newsroom colleague Kashmir Hill had technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html” title=””>a blockbuster article about a facial recognition company “that might end privacy as we know it.” It charts the rise of Clearview AI, a company that scrapes images from social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other sites to create a repository of billions of images.
Using Clearview’s app, law enforcement and government agencies can upload a photo of a person and the database will return matches to more photos and links to where the pictures came from.
You should read the whole article but one part that’s really stayed with me comes from one of Clearview’s early investors, David Scalzo:
“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said.
“Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology.
Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
Mr. Scalzo’s quotation is helpful because he’s saying the quiet part out loud.
His reasoning is alarming: Privacy is dead and nothing should halt the march of technological progress — not even the possibility of dystopia.
Clearview’s founder, Hoan Ton-That, also seemed caught off guard when asked to imagine the negative externalities of his tech.
“There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he told The Times.
And when faced with the bigger question — How do you feel about effectively eroding the ability to be anonymous in a crowd?
— Mr. Ton-That was hesitant.
“I have to think about that,” he said.
“Our belief is that this is the best use of the technology.”
Mr. Ton-That and Mr. Scalzo give a master class in what the writer Rose Eveleth calls “the myth of inevitable technological progress.” Technologists decide to compare the creep of new tools to evolution — a natural process.
Of course, this isn’t true

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