A start-up company named Clearview has collected billions of images from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites to create something never seen before. It’s an app that has the far-reaching ability to identify you and yours, where you work, and more.
The app isn’t for play. Law enforcement has access to it and can use it to do whatever they want. Worse, this risky technology is being protected by a veil of secrecy and if it were to fall into the wrong hands, ENDLESS private data could be breached and put us all at risk in terrible ways.
“600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year,” according to the New York Times, and some private companies also have access to this data too. The ability to protect the data they have is untested. It could be used for stalking or for foreign interference.
Black people have been fighting facial recognition around the country in cities like Detroit because this technology is proven to be biased against Black people. It’s more likely to misidentify us and worse. Clearview could be more far-reaching than anything we’ve seen.
This tech could be used to instantly identify anyone on the spot and for Black people, given our troubled history with policing and surveillance, that’s cause for concern. Privacy is a good thing and our community knows that because we haven’t always been afforded it.