Conversation. Ere really abouts its going to be with our executive director, rebekah tweed in conversation with New York Times tech reporter kashmir hill, author of the brand we are really excited about todays conversation. It will be with our executive director in conversation with New York Times tech reporter, kashmir hill, author of the brandnew and just out, your face belongs to us. The reason why i am excited about today is because she has been a pandering trailblazing voice in servicing these issues of the social impacts of technology. What we are focused on at all tech is human is really lowering this about how fast innovation moves and how slow our ability to consider its impact on how we live, love, learn and i. How to get jobs come into the world. These are big questions. That is why we cannot deal with these sitting alone in front of the screen. Come together, because many different backgrounds and voices. Going back to kashmir hill and the very role that the journalists play. Journalists are informing us about what is happening these oftentimes, things are done in a secretive matter, especially around homework that came out with this big New York Times expose a year or so ago around clearview ai. Oftentimes, what one founder might want to do is not in line with our interpretation of the tech future that we want. So much of what we are trying to do here at all tech is human is cocreate tech future that is in line with Public Interest and our values. That is why it behooves us to make sure that a small sliver of society does not dictate the future of our technology, which is the future of our democracy and human condition. People like kashmir hill are really exposing what is happening, so when we think about a topic, like facial recognition. One of the concerns that a lot of the space and have is that it feels like it is being placed upon us without our implied consent. The technology is released into the wild without us having some control or consent over how its designed, developed and deployed. This is the part that needs to change and this is why at all tech is human, we are bringing it across society, government, industry, academia. Informing the general public and influencing policymakers, tech companies. They are all part of the puzzle. When you look around today and after todays discussion when we are all mingling and if you still dont want to leave after we close down here at 8 30, we will continue the conversation next door at brass. It is good to meet other people who care about where this is headed. The real important part is that our future is not decided. Our future is being determined by what we do or do not do today, so without further ado, i have the pleasure of welcoming kashmir hill and our executive director of all tech is human, rebecca tweed will be in conversation. Please give them a warm welcome. [ applause ] excited to be here in conversation witho be kashmir hill hill. Kashmir is a tech reporter at the new thank you, david. Thank you, everyone, for coming tonight. Very excited to be here in conversation with kashmir hill. Kashmir hill is a tech reporter at the New York Times and author of your face belongs to us, which you can pick up after this and kashmir hill will be sending books for you over there. She writes about the unexpected and sometimes ominous ways that technology is changing our lives and particularly when it comes to privacy. She joined the times in 2019 after having worked at media group, fusion, Forbes Magazine and above the law. Her writing has appeared in the new yorker and washington post. She has degrees from Duke University and New York University where she studied journalism. Welcome. Its great to be here. Glad you are here in new york. You have been on a book tour. A lot of the book takes place here in new york. Can we set the stage . Can you give an overview . He started working at the times and its 2019. Someone approaches you with a tip about a startup. They have scribed billions of photos of faces and apparently they can determine who a person is based on a photo alone. Can you tell us what the company is and what about the company is different and what is concerning . I find out from a public records researcher that police are secretly using a Company Called clearview ai, which at the time has 3 billion photos script from the public web and there is very Little Information out there about the company. On their website, they had an address here in manhattan and it was just a few blocks away from the New York Times building, but when i walked over to it, the building wasnt there and did not exist. It was the first of many weird red flags about investigating the company. It wasnt obvious who was working for them and there just wasnt a lot out there as i was trying to dig in. There was about the company exposing so much about us trying to stay in the shadows. What they had done was shocking. We just had not seen Something Like this done before and it was a company that no one had heard of. Can you tell us a little bit about who is behind this company . Can you tell us about it . The main thing about clearview ai is a younger guy who grew up in australia obsessed with computers. He dropped out of his college where he was studying computer science, because he thought what the professors were teaching was boring and moved to San Francisco chasing the dream of Silicon Valley and was basically trying to make it there for a while and it was 2007. He made facebook quizzes, iphone games and throwing stuff at the wall to see what would stick. Nothing did. He ended up moving to new york in 2015 following a conservative crowd. They met the people that would become his cofounders for the company that became clearview ai. Something i thought was interesting about his story is that he does not have a mission he is chasing. He just wants to know what will be successful and stick. The facebook quizzes and he doesnt iphone app. He is really saying seeing what will work. Its based on facial recognition that some things are different. He really goes down this dark rabbit hole. You outlined in the book this long history of people thinking that they can determine something about a person based on their facial features. It was really interesting to me that he seemed pretty obsessed with, can you determine who is a shoplifter or border crosser . Someone crossing illegally or a terrorist . I am really curious about some of the youth cases when he stumbles onto the idea how did he get there and what was he trying to do with it before he discovered the use case of Law Enforcement. To set the scene, 2015 and 2016 and this time that he comes to new york. It is a big time in artificial intelligence. It is when they were really starting to make advances in Computer Vision and Machine Learning or neural net technology. This is so many of the advances that surround us. Chatted gpt, image generation and the same with facial recognition. This is a time when computers are getting peters and Software Techniques are Getting Better for computers to process all of the data, recognize patterns. The people that he founded the company with dust mite can we take a photo with somebody . Can we understand more about them . They were thinking about putting any more recognizing the face, but what about what can we learn about their facial teachers . They were tapping into ideas that we consider outdated about what you can tell about a person from their face. One thing he talked about doing with his cofounders was around the time that Ashley Madison was breached. Does everyone know what that is . Extramarital dating site. A place to go if you want to cheat on your partner. It is all of the users, along with names and addresses. We should take the database of people, look them up on facebook, download their faces and we can train a computer to know what a cheating face looks like. They have the same idea about intelligence. Same thing with criminality and they have the idea that computers can data mine who we were and figure out from their face. That did not end up being successful. And reannounces the idea that computers will be capable of that and instead went to something that was much easier by comparison, which was downloading photos from the internet. It shows you all of the other places where their face appears along with the link to the website, so that is what you can find out. Name, social media profiles, who they know and maybe photos they dont know or on the internet. It is really interesting to see how that develops into the use case for Law Enforcement agencies, which is interesting. Can you tell us about how he discovered that is where he wanted that was the target market first product . Clearview ai was originally called smart checker and when they started doing this, one of the first places that they got access to photos was venmo. Com. On venmos website , they had realtime transactions that were happening on the web. They would have their photos and a link to their Profile Photo page. They ended up downloading all of these photos, so originally smart checker, which is a way to find take a picture of somebody and find their venmo account. Originally, they were trying to figure out who would pay for it. Who would want this tool for taking a photo of somebody and find out who they were . They pitched it to hotels, companies and banks. Figuring out the High Net Worth people. They are really giving it to investors and grocery stores. They had all of these first people to use clearview ai, which were wealthy people in new york. My favorite story is john who is a resident billionaire and owns and was prevented incorrectly. They pitched it to him to have in his gross resource to identify shoplifters. He told me he was having a hard time with heloise. People were stealing ice cream. They also gave the after him to put on his phone and i was like, how do you use it . He said, one time i was having dinner at the Italian Restaurant and my daughter walked in and she had this date on her arm and i wanted to know who he was, so i had a way to go over and take a photo, then i ran the photo through clearview ai and i figured out who he was and i approved. It is about putting clearview ai and checking the identity of people coming to the building and the security chief was the app and he used to work for the nypd. He said, well this works very well and it would be a tool that my colleagues my former colleagues would love. He introduced them to the nypd. They ended up being used by police and it was very popular with the nypd. People have a tendency to want to miss use the tool like that for personal uses and it seems like it was part of what was happening with Police Departments, as well. The nypd wanted to build some checks to make sure it didnt happen. Do you want to mention anything around that . Originally, it was used by the financial crimes unit and they tend to have photos of fraudsters at an atm or bank counter, so they start running the photos through clearview ai network and they told their colleagues, so clearview ai was offering these 30 day free trials to any police officer. They just start handing it out like candy to the nypd and this is striking to me, because when i first started looking into this, i didnt know that police could use any tool they wanted, just like from some random guy and download it and start actively using it in investigations without checking the accuracy of the algorithm. Just try it and see if you like it. It was spreading along nypd. Other Police Departments and the department of homeland security. It started spreading like wildfire through Law Enforcement as one investor put it. The one thing nypd was worried about is if we start giving it to our officers, how do we make sure that they are only using it for work purposes and not out at a bar and they see a pretty person run his or her photo and find out who they are . They were starting to ask, how do we keep track of how many searches are being run . How do we make sure that there isnt a case number associated . Clearview ai was building those kinds of ways of monitoring usage in reaction to the police as opposed to before. That is interesting. One of the other things i find interesting in the book and bringing it back to quan. There is a time where you outline his foray into the world and how he starts associating with a lot of far right personalities, like Chuck Johnson and how the deplorable played into the development of the tool of smart checker at the time, which became clearview. Could you talk about the impact of his proximity . Some of the early use cases of the tool that became clearview ai were pretty alarming. Basically, the first time it was used, it was still called smart checker and was at the deplorable in washington, d. C. , which was an event around trumps inauguration to celebrate all of the work people had done to get him elected and they wanted to make sure that they didnt have anybody from the far left coming in. They didnt want any people there, so apparently they searched people who bought tickets and they claimed that they identified two people who are affiliated with the Antifascist Coalition and made sure they didnt get tickets. I found out about that, because they used the case when they were pitching the technology to the hungarian government as a Border Control technology. They said, we have actually they claimed that they had fine tuned their product to identify people affiliated with george soros and the open Society Foundations who are pushing for democratic reforms and hungary. They said, this would be a great tool for keeping them out. In it, they were really affiliated with these conservative causes. How could things to allergy use technology in political weight . When you are talking about what is different about clearview and not necessarily a thick illogical breakthrough, but ethical of sorts where they were willing to do what other were not necessarily. You talk about how they get photos of this basis. The example is classic. Venmo. It is so interesting that they took this realtime feed and pull photos. Facebook making Profile Photos public by default, then being able to scrape those photos. Facebook assures people that the technology exists to make sure that you cant take the photos. What i was confused about is, how did clearview come through and scrape all of the facebook photos when they werent supposed to be able to . There is a problem for all of us in terms of dealing with privacy. One, it is hard for us to understand what will happen in technology that we need to protect ourselves against. Many of us who have posted photos of ourselves, others and loved ones on the internet over the past two or three decades were anticipating that a company like clearview ai were going to come along, scrape them all and organize the internet around our faces. One, it is hard for us to predict that and protect ourselves against that. There is this other question of, what Technology Companies have done or not done to protect us . With facebook, i think it is such an interesting company, because it forces us to grapple with what Online Privacy means, because of the way that we started putting Information Online and got in unexpected ways from your boss figuring out that you are not sick or on vacation to have everyone start your relationship status. Facebook encouraged us all to put our photos online and do it alongside our faces. We have done on facebook and instagram. They have not done i know people. Clearview ai and our other actors have done it again and again. There is not people that are protecting us. He developed scrapers himself and told us about hiring random people that he met in strange corners of the internet to go out and hunt faces for him. He said, sometimes you wouldnt even know their name. They would be like, i scraped couch surfing. Com and angel list and i have this collection of faces. You want to buy it . You can pay me in cryptocurrency. It was a freeforall on the internet to get faces. It is hard for us to protect ourselves against that, because its not just the photos that you have posted publicly, but people who have other people who have posted photos of you. There are companies that have many of our photos, like google and facebook and it is so interesting. At the end of part one, you talk about how the companies could do it, but chose not to. He say it wasnt that they couldnt build it, but they were afraid to. Why were they afraid to do something that a random startup , like clearview ai was not . When i first found out and reported about it, i and people i talked to all thought that clearview ai had a technological breakthrough. They had done something that Silicon Valley and the government had not been able to do. Gather these photos from everywhere and create a very powerful algorithm for searching them all. As i did reporting and for the book, i discovered that google has developed Technology Like this internally as early as 2011 , then chairman said that it was the one technology that google had developed, but decided to hold back. I think that would change with the current generative ai tools that google had tools and change the game, but facebook, i got to see this video of facebook engineers in a Conference Room with the most absurd version of the future i have ever seen. One of the engineers is wearing a baseball cap and has a smart phone on the brim of it held in place by rubber bands. When he looked around the room and the camera focused on somebody, the phone would speak the persons voice. The Technology Companies and google and facebook ar