From watching John Oliver’s video, I was shocked by the use of facial recognition by Clearview.ai. The audacity of the company to undermine basic human rights and weaponize technology against civilians was horrifying. After reading another article related to it, I found that Clearview.ai only has an unverified “75% accuracy” of detecting faces. Not only are they capable of scraping 3 billion photos against people’s will, but they also take no responsibility for potentially mis-identifying people and further perpetuate racial profiling. I wonder, then, whether the federal government is even capable of regulating these technologies, as previous hearings with tech giants have proven that lawmakers have little to no understanding of how technology operates.
After reading Nabil Hassein’s response to the Algorithmic Justice League, I found it interesting that Hassein would rather see anti-racist technology efforts put into meddling with machine learning models, rather than filling up the missing gap of identifying black faces. I wonder whether facial detection should’ve never been invented in the first place, as more efforts need to be placed to combat the growing technology, rather than help develop it more.