Don't scrape the faces of our citizens for recognition, Canada tells Clearview AI – delete those images
- Reference: 1612782070
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/08/in_brief_ai/
- Source link:
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada launched an official investigation into the upstart’s practices, and as a result Clearview [1]stopped selling its software to Canadian police.
[2]
“Clearview's massive collection of millions of images without the consent or knowledge of individuals for the purpose of marketing facial recognition services does not comply with Quebec's privacy or biometric legislation,” [3]said Diane Poitras, President of the Quebec Commission on Access to Information, a government organization involved in the investigation.
The startup was told to stop taking people’s photos to train its facial-recognition software, delete all the ones it has collected from people in Canada, and to not sell its services to any Canadian customers. New-York-based Clearview, however, argued that it does not have a “real and substantial connection” to the country so shouldn’t need to abide by its laws, and that consent was not needed to scrape the photos since they’re all publicly available anyway.
[4]
Have your Flickr photos been used to train a facial recognition model?
AI researchers have built an online tool that allows people to check if their selfies have been used to secretly train facial-recognition software.
Exposing.ai – built by developer and artist Adam Harvey, and Liz O’Sullivan, technology director at privacy rights group the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project – looked through AI training datasets built from scraping creative-commons-licensed photos on photo-sharing site Flickr. They tracked down the URL for each photo and put it into a database, and users can look through the data by searching for a specific URL, image hashtag, or Flickr username.
If there’s a hit, then the image is present in at least one of the six datasets used to teach machines how to identify faces. “People need to realize that some of their most intimate moments have been weaponized,” O’Sullivan [5]told the NYT. “The potential for harm seemed too great.”
You can use the tool [6]here .
The List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words AI researchers use to filter data
The best way to prevent machine-learning models from generating any text or images that are too racy and lewd is to not train the software on data that is, well, too racy or lewd.
One way that researchers do this is by automatically screening any data that contains or is related to x-rated subject areas that they want their models to avoid. Enter the List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words, known as LDNOOBW, a handy checklist containing indecent words, and now [7]shared on GitHub.
Created first by folks over at Shutterstock, the stock image biz, the list contains hundreds of words in numerous languages so far, and is now employed by other tech companies like Slack and Google, Wired [8]reported .
Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus, the popular text dataset used to train large language models, uses LDNOOBW to filter out webpages containing those words. The idea is that words like ‘busty’ or ‘kinky’ are more likely to be associated with pornographic sites and are blocked from the training data. But some critics believe censoring some words means that these algorithms will have no knowledge of some human sexualities that are traditionally underrepresented.
Do you need an AI algo to help you code at work?
Kite, a startup focused on building autocomplete tools for programmers using machine learning, now has support specifically for developers on the job. Companies can now pay for an enterprise license to use the software at work, in other words.
It costs $40 per user per month, $10 more than its l [9]license for individuals . Students are allowed to use it for free.
The enterprise version, known as Kite Team Server, is more powerful and runs on GPU servers rather than CPU ones. The software can also be trained on a company’s proprietary codebase to come up with suggestions based on custom code.
CEO Adam Smith, told The Register , that people’s code is always kept private.
“Kite Team Server custom-trains ML models on a GPU behind the company's firewall. Kite Team Server ensures code stays private and secure by keeping it behind the firewall.” None of the inputs and outputs generated by its tools are stored on its servers or shared.
[10]
You can read more about it [11]here . ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/09/clearview_privacy_stop/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_emergent_tech/artificial_intelligence&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YCFuKd1gaE2trSht7uS5aAAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/news-and-announcements/2021/nr-c_210203/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_emergent_tech/artificial_intelligence&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YCFuKd1gaE2trSht7uS5aAAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/technology/facial-recognition-photo-tool.html
[6] https://exposing.ai/
[7] https://github.com/LDNOOBW/List-of-Dirty-Naughty-Obscene-and-Otherwise-Bad-Words
[8] https://www.wired.com/story/ai-list-dirty-naughty-obscene-bad-words/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/12/ai_code_corrector/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_emergent_tech/artificial_intelligence&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YCFuKd1gaE2trSht7uS5aAAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.kite.com/blog/product/announcing-kite-team-server/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Clearview.
As they feel they don't have to abide by Canadian laws, due to having no presence, can I suggest the authorities block all their IP addresses until they do comply.
since they’re all publicly available anyway
And presumably Clearview can document that they have checked with the rights holders that CV may use the scraped images in this way?
I think in the States you have to register for copyright, but this side of the pond, and I would guess Canada also, copyright exists as soon as something is published.
Re: since they’re all publicly available anyway
Copyright exists as soon as somebody has the financial weight to enforce it. Else it's just an abstract notion without any real world impact.
Re: since they’re all publicly available anyway
The thing with registering for copyright in the US is if you want to claim for damages.
Re: since they’re all publicly available anyway
Copyright means exactly what it says. The right to *copy* the work. Using an image to train an AI does not necessarily entail copying that image, so copyright issues would not apply. Nor would it violate copyright if you reduced an image to a set of numbers that you stored so that recognition software could use to match two images of the same face.
In addition, you quite likely gave away your copyright to the site that you uploaded the image to (e.g. Facebook, snapchat YouTube etc.) when you clicked on "I agree" to their terms & conditions.
Re: since they’re all publicly available anyway
There is also some applied permission once you publish it.
For example this message is copyright and you owe me one first born son, 3 Cadburys creme eggs and a million $ for copying it to your browser cache.
Parasites.
They seem as bad as the ad industry for assuming that they have some absolute right to our data, whether our interests and purchases or our actual likeness. Publicly posted or not, I decline to grant permission for them to take my image and use it for their commercial ends, and this should really be enshrined in law
LDNOOBW
The problem with claiming words are bad, obscence, sexual, etc. is that it depends on the word's context & culture. An offenseive word in, say, America, may be perfectly fine in the UK.
Re: LDNOOBW
Seemingly innocuous words Americans should watch out for - [1]https://bestlifeonline.com/offensive-american-words-overseas/
(no connection to site, just googled it)
[1] https://bestlifeonline.com/offensive-american-words-overseas/
Checked out that article, it was mostly a fun read.
Basically, I learned that almost every term outlined in US English has a sexual connotation in GB English.
But the one thing that really made me LOL was the reference to an article intitled "This Is the Age When Men Are Most Likely to Cheat".
Really ?
Name me one age where men were not likely to cheat.
I think the only one that qualifies was the period of the Black Plague - because men were locked at home to escape death instead of on the prowl for another chance to dip their wick.
In the UK "fag" is (now) quite innocuous. I've heard that America is a few years behind the UK in its use of the word "fag" and so saying "I'm going to get a fag" in America is likely to be frowned on.
The one I remember...
... from a while back was "I'm going to smoke a fag" which really had a different meaning in the States.
Re: The one I remember...
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzPZfz3IgcM
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzPZfz3IgcM
Re: The one I remember...
"What's this here", he said suspiciously, "about us got to give you faggots?"
"Oh, we have to have them," said Newt. "We burn them."
The guard's face broadened into a grin. And they'd told him England was soft. "Right on!" he said.
From the greatest book ever, strangely left out of the TV version.
A friend of mine got 7 days in facebook jail for saying "I don't like faggots", when we were discussing Mr Brains' pork products.
" consent was not needed to scrape the photos since they’re all publicly available anyway "
Publicly available for looking at doesn't imply publicly available for mass collection and analysis for commercial reasons.
" argued that it does not have a “real and substantial connection” to the country so shouldn’t need to abide by its laws "
Really? Well, since Gary McKinnon doesn't have any real and substantial connection to the US....
"alaskan pipeline" I mean, I know people will use literally anything as slang for something sexual; but you can't block on that!
It's a huge and relevant current issue - blocking that is just as bad as China blocking Tiannaman Square.