The End of Public Anonymity Is Close

So, you may have heard of Clearview:

The app, says the Times, works by comparing a photo to a database of more than three billion pictures that Clearview says it’s scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube, and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared.

Clearview is only for law enforcement for now, but this is the future. Facial recognition, combined with other metrics like gait analysis, means the end of public anonymity.

There’s a strand of thinking which claims that no one has an expectation of anonymity in public, but the loss of it will be catastrophic. If someone knows who you are, and where you are, they can easily stalk you or rob you when they know you aren’t at home. This sort of technology in the wild (and even in the hands of cops) will lead to rapes and assaults. “I like how she looks. I wonder who she is? Cool, now that I know it’s easy enough to find out where she works and lives.”

It will wind up in the wild. It’s not too far from a reverse image search to this, and the images required for the training are in the wild, as Clearview notes.

Add this to corporate and government databases, with real-time scraping of public phone data and heat maps of public travel become possible. Add it to financial information (every time you use your credit, debit, and charge cards) and even finer grade surveillance is possible. Add in GPS data and/or security cameras and where you are at all times of day will be known.

The potential for abuse by corporations is massive: They already attention farm us, using conditioning techniques to make us click and buy and spend hours a day on social media. (Yes, this is very effective conditioning.) The abuse by your boss, well, just hope you never do–or have never done–anything your boss doesn’t approve of. You ain’t seen cancel culture yet.

The potential political abuses are, I trust, obvious.

And then there is the potential for abuse by parents, who already obnoxiously track their kids in ways that would look ludicrous to previous generations of children and which have, among other things, shown up as a generational decline in creativity.

The larger issue is this: People who are constantly under surveillance become super-conformers out of defense. Without true private time, the public persona and the private personality tend to collapse together. You need a backstage — by yourself and with a small group of friends to become yourself. You need anonymity.

When everything you do is open to criticism by everyone, you will become timid and conforming.

When governments, corporations, schools, and parents know everything, they will try to control everything. This won’t often be for your benefit.

Solutions for this are simple. Make it illegal. Make public images and data private by default and do not allow consumers to opt out of it without real payment per image or data piece. (This will gut training AI, which is good, because most current AI is bad (a topic for another time).)

People should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity. Software like this should be illegal.

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