Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill

Author:Kashmir Hill [Hill, Kashmir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

I HAVE A COMPLAINT

In January 2020, Matthias Marx, thirty-one, was deeply troubled after reading the New York Times article about Clearview AI. He was a technologist who cared deeply about online privacy. As a PhD student at the University of Hamburg, he built tools to help people avoid inadvertently sprinkling their data around the internet. He was also a member of the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker collective obsessed with protecting digital rights.

Though Marx considered himself knowledgeable about the different ways people’s digital movements are tracked, he hadn’t thought much about the face being one of them. Reading about Clearview AI, he wondered if the American company, which claimed to have amassed a database of billions of faces, had his.

So he sent the company an email. “Dear sir or madam,” he wrote. “Please provide access to my personal data.” He included a digital headshot. He was standing outside wearing a black T-shirt, in strong contrast to his pale, freckled skin. He had squinty blue eyes, a generous nose, and a broad neck. When the photo was taken, he was smiling slyly, his longish blond hair blowing in the wind.

That might seem like an oddball request, a message that the company would ignore or delete. Why would New York–based Clearview respond to some random grad student from Germany asking for information about himself? Clearview had data on millions of people, after all. How could it possibly take the time to answer emails like that from any of them?

Well, Clearview didn’t have a choice. European law required the company to respond to Marx and to do so within thirty days. If Clearview wanted to sell its facial recognition tool in Europe—which it was trying to do at the time—it had to respect one of the fundamental rights of EU citizens: “access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.” The right was reinforced and strengthened in 2018, when the European Union put into effect the world’s most stringent privacy law with the world’s most boring name: the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Marx not only had the right to ask for any photos Clearview AI had of him; he had the right to demand that the company delete them.

But Marx did not think it would come to that. In fact, the request was a bit of a lark. He was a private person and avoided putting photos of himself on the public internet, so it seemed unlikely that the American company would have him in its database, but it was worth a try.

A week later, he got a response from Clearview, addressed erroneously to “Christian,” asking for a government-issued ID. “We need to confirm your identity to guard against fraudulent access requests,” said the email from [email protected]. Clearview needed to ensure that Marx was Marx, and not an impostor trying to get his data.

Clearview also wanted the ID to see where Marx lived. “These rights are not absolute,” the email said, noting that they “vary by jurisdiction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.