This week, while I was boarding a plane, two men at the front of the line started screaming at each other.

One was in biz class, the other in economy. Halfway through the flight, the guy in biz came down the aisle to take a photo of the person he’d fought with. (1/5) This upset other passengers but I found it particularly chilling.

I was flying to Pittsburgh to give a talk about facial recognition tools that can ID a stranger with just a picture of their face. (2/5)

Your Face Belongs To Us is out in the world today!

It starts with a shocking tip that I got a few years ago: a radical startup had scraped a billion faces from the internet without people’s consent to build a face recognition app for the police. (1/11) penguinrandomhouse.com/books/691288/y…


At first the company, Clearview AI, didn’t want to talk to me. It had an address in Manhattan and one employee on LinkedIn– neither was real. Eventually, I found the main person behind the app, Hoan Ton-That, a tech obsessive with an eyebrow-raising internet trail.

Police showed up at Porsha Woodruff’s door in Detroit to arrest her for carjacking. She was 8 months pregnant. The suspect in the crime, committed 2 weeks earlier, was not. Police still charged her in another case of facial recognition tech gone awry. 🧵nytimes.com/2023/08/06/tec… Woodruff is the 6th person, and 1st woman, known to have been arrested as a result of an investigation that started with an automated face search. In all known cases, those who have been wrongfully accused are Black.

Story from me on this fascinating project pairing Instagram photos with footage showing process of taking them. I talked to one of the Instagrammers. And no, he is not an “influencer” w/“hundreds of thousands of followers” as has been reported elsewhere nytimes.com/2022/09/24/tec…

https://twitter.com/driesdepoorter/status/1569285878089908231

To make this work, the artist relied on photos people had tagged to particular locations on Instagram and on cameras that live-stream from various places around the globe that were put there by an early internet company called @EarthCam

A Florida man was in a horrific one-car crash that left his friend dead. Police said he was the driver & charged him w/vehicular homicide. He needed to find the Good Samaritan who pulled him from the passenger seat of the burning car to prove his innocence nytimes.com/2022/09/18/tec… The police had talked to the Good Samaritan after the accident but not gotten his name or contact information. They had captured his face on their body-worn cameras. A lawyer for the accused spent “hundreds of hours” looking for the man, to no avail.

A dad in San Francisco took photos of his toddler’s groin for the doctor. When his Android backed the photos up to the cloud, Google flagged them as child sexual abuse material. He lost his Google account and was investigated by the police. nytimes.com/2022/08/21/tec… While reporting out the San Francisco dad’s story I stumbled upon a post on Quora with the exact same story. The details were so similar that I thought at first that my original source had written it. But he hadn’t. It was another dad in Texas.

After talking to people freaked out by Apple 'AirTag detected near you' alerts, I decided to test out the location trackers currently on the market.

By planting them on my husband and his belongings.

With his permission.
nytimes.com/2022/02/11/tec… There were a disturbing number of results when I googled "spouse tracker" and the reviews were 👀.

My jaw dropped to the floor when I got this news. Facebook is shutting down the facial recognition system that it introduced more than 10 years ago and deleting the faceprints of 1 billion people: nytimes.com/2021/11/02/tec… Why now? Meta's VP of AI, @an_open_mind, says it is because of the "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." Facebook/Meta's post about the decision: about.fb.com/news/2021/11/u…

Google has a new concept called "known victims" for revenge porn & people serially attacked on slander sites. Once a person requests removal of these results from a search of their name, Google will automatically suppress similar content from resurfacing. nytimes.com/2021/06/10/tec… One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: support.google.com/websearch/trou…

There is a constellation of sites online that exist for the sole purpose of destroying people's reputations. @Aaron_Krolik and I wanted to figure out who was making money off them and how. nytimes.com/interactive/20… Investigating the reputation extortion industry was incredibly challenging! The reportorial equivalent of walking into a dark room, turning on the lights, and watching roaches scatter. Fake companies, false identities, and lies lies lies.

After I reported the existence of Clearview AI in January 2020, the company's world exploded: lawsuits, international investigations, letters from senators. I've been talking to company CEO Hoan Ton-That through it all for this @nytmag cover story: nytimes.com/interactive/20… Clearview is still attracting new customers and new funding but it is under siege in Illinois, which has a law that says you can't use people's faceprints without consent. Clearview’s lawyer Floyd Abrams is arguing the law violates the company’s First Amendment rights.

I've been working on this internet horror story for months, but the people in it have been living it for more than a decade. nytimes.com/2021/01/30/tec… In September 2018, Guy Babcock discovered that he and his entire extended family had been branded pedophiles, scammers, thieves and sexual deviants online. When he investigated, he discovered a 25-year-old grudge. nytimes.com/2021/01/30/tec…

Given how sensitive therapy sessions are, I started looking into start-ups that do therapy via text & then keep the transcripts. But the investigation turned up so much more than I expected: nytimes.com/2020/08/07/tec… Talkspace, a text therapy app made famous by Michael Phelps ads, keeps transcripts for about 7 to 10 years because they're medical records—and data-mines them, of course. But all the other stuff going on there was WILD. nytimes.com/2020/08/07/tec…

In January, in the first known case of its kind, a man in Michigan was arrested for a crime he did not commit due to a flawed algorithmic facial recognition match. I told his story here: nytimes.com/2020/06/24/tec… Robert Williams initially thought the call at work from the police, telling him to come in to be arrested, was a prank. But when he got home, he was handcuffed on his front lawn in front of his wife and two young, distraught daughters.

The privacy paranoid among us have long worried that all of our online photos would be scraped to create a universal face recognition app. My friends, it happened and it’s here: nytimes.com/2020/01/18/tec… I'm not sure which is scarier/more desirable. An app that puts a name to a face in seconds, or an app that shows you all the online photos of you that you didn't realize were there. This app does both, but only law enforcement has access to it, for now.

A detective in Florida got a warrant to search a genetic genealogy database, including users who had opted out of searches by law enforcement. “That’s a huge game-changer,” said @ErinMurphysLaw. nytimes.com/2019/11/05/bus… @ErinMurphysLaw Alert to Ancestry.com and 23andMe users, @ErinMurphysLaw said: "The company made a decision to keep law enforcement out, and that’s been overridden by a court. It’s a signal that no genetic information can be safe." nytimes.com/2019/11/05/bus…

First-person adventure time: I’ve been cutting the tech giants out of my life one by one. gizmodo.com/life-without-t… Because I’m a masochist, I started with the company I thought would be the most painful: Amazon. It was more than a boycott, @dmehro built me a custom VPN to block all things Amazon, including all sites hosted on AWS. gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-blo…

Remember when Amazon was taking down book reviews by people it thought knew the author personally and people were wondering how in the world Amazon knew that imysantiago.com/2015/07/02/ama… This new NYT report sheds light on how Amazon may have determined book reviewers were connected to a book’s author nytimes.com/2018/12/18/tec…

Facebook Was Fully Aware That Tracking Who People Call and Text Is Creepy But Did It Anyway
gizmodo.com/facebook-was-f… It's really refreshing, if disturbing, to see Facebook employees talk candidly about how to do privacy-invasive things without freaking users out and causing a press backlash. Thank you for the bizarre happenings in the UK that led to the release of internal FB emails.

California has to pass a privacy bill in the next 48 hours or the policy shit is going to hit the direct democracy fan gizmodo.com/california-has… All you need to get serious privacy legislation passed in the U.S. is millions of dollars and a legislative crow bar

Google held back from offering facial recognition for years because it “crossed the creepy line.” Meanwhile, Amazon has started selling it for $12/month: washingtonpost.com/news/the-switc… It looks like Oregon police aren’t the only ones using Amazon’s facial “Rekognition” tech aws.amazon.com/rekognition/