2023-11-03
33 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Today, how facial recognition technology is upending privacy.
Last December, Kelly Conlan was preparing a special outing for her daughter.
She was taking her daughter, who was in the Girl Scouts with the troupe, to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.
It was, you know, a holiday show.
This is Kashmir Hill, a tech reporter for the New York Times.
And as they try to enter Radio City Music Hall, Kelly Conlon gets pulled aside and asked for her id, and she's informed that she's not allowed in the in the venue.
Kelly had been put on a temporary blacklist because she worked at a law firm that was suing the owner of the venue, who also owned a bunch of other big event spaces like Madison Square Garden.
Kelly wasn't even working on that lawsuit, but when she entered the building, she was flagged by the venue's facial recognition system.
They had decided to use facial recognition technology to punish their enemies, and they weren't letting things thousands of lawyers into their various venues until they dropped their lawsuits or resolved the litigation.
The parent company that owns the venue called its facial recognition policy straightforward, just one of its tools to provide a safe environment.
This idea of using it to really just ban your enemies was a pioneering use of the technology.
And I could just imagine all the different ways it could go if more businesses adopted that practice.
It could really usher in a new era of discrimination, this ability to judge us, track us, monitor us, ban us.
Kashmir has been reporting on the ways facial recognition technology is being used in the real world, particularly by US Law enforcement agencies.
In her new book, you, Face Belongs to Us, she looks at how one company in particular, Clearview AI, has ushered in the use of this new technology with a sort of move fast and break things ethos and how other companies in the field and regulators are struggling to agree on what guardrails are needed.
I was eager to talk with Kashmir about what this tech can and can't do right now and what our world might look like if it keeps getting bigger and more powerful in the future.
But first I asked her to explain how she learned about Clearview AI.
I found out about this radical startup that claimed to have done something pretty astounding.