Hey everyone, Josh here.
Over the weekend, the New York Times dropped a piece about a little-known tech company called Clearview that "claims to have scraped [billions of images] from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants." So, pretty scary stuff.
Facial-recognition software will be one of the biggest tech battlegrounds in the foreseeable future, pitting companies like Amazon, Facebook/Instagram, and Snapchat against federal lawmakers, while at the same time the general public's perception of constantly being watched by both the government and corporate America has some naturally spooked. Interestingly, as we reported in September, Pew Research found that people are more comfortable with police using the tech rather than brands.
(Here's a video we produced at the beginning of the month to show how facial recognition technology works.)
While the technology grows in influence across the nation's law enforcement departments, if not during water cooler conversations in Silicon Valley, several studies have found that facial recognition has an inherent racial bias that can stymie adoption.
As the Washington Post reported last month:
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal laboratory known as NIST that develops standards for new technology, found “empirical evidence” that most of the facial-recognition algorithms exhibit “demographic differentials” that can worsen their accuracy based on a person’s age, gender or race.
And at a time when technology moves faster than the law, when privacy is at the forefront of national and corporate debate, perhaps we all should be wearing these futuristic-looking sun visors that, as NPR reported in 2017, will "protect the wearers' identities."
Then again, we all like using Instagram and Snapchat. Your face swap with your significant other can't work without a little facial recognition.
As we continue to explore digital trends, drop me a line to tell me what's working, what's not, what you'd like to see more/less of, or if you just want to say hi.
Have a great week and see you on Monday. On to the news.
Josh Sternberg
Media and Tech Editor
