Always easier when you can avoid the law and just buy it off the shelf. It’s fine to do this, we say, because it’s not being done by the government - but if they’re allowed to turn around and buy it we’re much worse off.

• digiown

  today at 6:22 PM

  That's why it doesn't make sense to ban governments from doing things while still allowing private companies. Either it is illegal to surveil the public for everyone, or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect.

  I don't think the deal described here is even that egregious. It's basically a labeled data scrape. Any entity capable of training these LLMs are able to do this.

  • asveikau

    today at 6:46 PM

    The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.

    That said, I do believe there ought to be more restrictions on private use of these technologies.

    • pixl97

      today at 7:04 PM

      >A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row.

      A private company can 100% do this in many ways. They already do this buy putting up and using their technology in minority areas, for example.

      • unethical_ban

        today at 7:11 PM

        It's a distinction. Private companies are partnering with the government to take away personal liberty.

        We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.

        • bjt

          today at 8:33 PM

          The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant.

          The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.

          On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.

          • dimitrios1

            today at 9:00 PM

            > The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.

            Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?

        • asveikau

          today at 7:18 PM

          I also personally think there are some private collections we should ban, or put in place limitations on how it can be used, in the interest of general privacy.

          That is trickier to decide on and surely there's room to debate.

    • helterskelter

      today at 6:58 PM

      Yeah but these companies are operating hand in glove with govt such that there's no discernible difference between the current system and government just doing it themselves. Ban it outright.

      • asveikau

        today at 7:13 PM

        I don't disagree with the sentiment. I feel like what we're seeing lately is that private companies are doing the thing that would violate the 4th amendment if government did it, then they sell to the government. The idea that it's not the government itself violating the constitution because they did it through a contractor is pretty absurd.

        What specific legal measures you do to enforce this, I don't know, there's some room for debate there.

        • digiown

          today at 7:40 PM

          I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media. Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment. The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data". To have an expectation of privacy, the data needs to not be shared in the first place.

          I don't think tying the hands of the government is a viable solution. The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions, as well as legislation to impose costs on data collection.

          - Teaching that "the cloud is just someone else's computer"

          - E2EE cloud

          - Some way of sharing things that don't involve pushing them to the whole internet, like Signal's stories.

          - GDPR type legislation which allows deleting, opting out, etc

          • magicalist

            today at 9:46 PM

            > The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data"

            This isn't actually true (it varies by type of "cloud data", like content vs metadata, and the circuit you're in), and there are multiple recent carveouts (eg geofence warrants) that when the Supreme Court bothers to look at it again, suggests they don't feel it's as clear as it was decades ago. Congress can also just go ahead and any time make it clear they don't like it (see the Stored Communications Act).

            It's also, just to be clear, an invented doctrine, and absolutely not in the constitution like the fourth amendment is. Don't cede the principle just because it has a name. Technical and social solutions are good, but we should not tolerate our government acting as it does.

          • asveikau

            today at 8:31 PM

            > I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media

            Neither is there an expectation that automation would slurp it up and build a database on you and everyone else. Maybe the HN crowd is one thing, but most normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed.

            > Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment.

            Every time I see someone make a statement like this I think of the Iraq war era when a Berkeley law professor said torture is legal. Simply saying something that clearly violates the spirit of our rights is ok based on a technicality, I would not call that a moral high ground.

            > The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions,

            At this point and points forward I think your comment is much more on the mark.

            • digiown

              today at 9:25 PM

              I think we clearly both agree that mass surveillance is problematic regardless of whether it is done by the government or corporations. With that said

              > normies would probably say it shouldn't be allowed

              Despite knowing about this, most continue supporting the various companies doing exactly that, like Facebook and Google.

              > Neither is there an expectation [...]

              Expectation is not law, and it cuts both ways. The authors of the 4th and 5th amendments likely did not anticipate the existence of encryption - in their view, the flip side of the 4th amendment is that with a warrant, the government could search anything except your mind, which can't store that much information. We now get to enjoy an almost absolute right to privacy due to the letter of the law. You might feel that we should have that right anyway, but many other governments with a more recent/flexible constitution do not guarantee that, and in fact require key disclosure.

              • magicalist

                today at 10:14 PM

                > > Neither is there an expectation [...]

                > Expectation is not law.

                It is in this case.

                Expectation of privacy is a legal test based literally on on what "normies would probably say". If, as a society, we're moving more and more of our private effects to the cloud, there is a point where there's an expectation of privacy from the government there, regardless of the shadiness of the company we trusted for it, and regardless of what's convenient for the government.

                https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/expectation_of_privacy

                Carpenter v. United States is a great example of this, where a thing once thought as obviously falling under the third party doctrine (cell tower location information) was put definitively within protection by the fourth amendment because of ongoing changes in how society used and considered cell phones.

                And I forgot about this but just saw it referenced in the wikipedia article: it's notable that Gorsuch's dissent on the case argued for dropping the third party doctrine completely:

                > There is another way. From the founding until the 1960s, the right to assert a Fourth Amendment claim didn’t depend on your ability to appeal to a judge’s personal sensibilities about the “reasonableness” of your expectations or privacy. It was tied to the law. The Fourth Amendment protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” True to those words and their original understanding, the traditional approach asked if a house, paper or effect was yours under law. No more was needed to trigger the Fourth Amendment....

                > Under this more traditional approach, Fourth Amendment protections for your papers and effects do not automatically disappear just because you share them with third parties.

                https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/16-402

    • WrongAssumption

      today at 7:32 PM

      But that is his point with "or the government can always do it indirectly with the same effect"

      The company doesn't have that power, but the government can compel companies to provide them with the same data as long as it exists, and then abuse it in the same way as if they had collected it themselves.

    • heavyset_go

      today at 7:34 PM

      A private company can put you on a list and you'll never have a home again.

    • digiown

      today at 7:44 PM

      A private company can rat you out the government in the same way that a private citizen can report you to the police. I don't see a reasonable way to change this.

      The government should be held to higher standards in terms of being able to appeal its actions, fairness, evidentiary standards. But the government shouldn't necessarily be prevented from acquiring and using information (which is otherwise legally obtained).

      I don't disagree that we should perhaps more restrictions on private processing of data though -- GDPR style legislation that imposes a cost on data collection is probably sufficient.

    • kristopolous

      today at 7:02 PM

      The separation between private and the government is purely theatrics - a mere administrative shell.

      I really don't understand why people treat it with such sacrosanct reverence.

      It reminds me of a cup and ball street scam. Opportunistic people move things around and there's a choir of true believers who think there's some sacred principles of separation to uphold as they defend the ornamental labels as if they're some divine decree.

      I mean come on. Know when you're getting played.

      • asveikau

        today at 7:16 PM

        In some cases yes, especially when it comes to surveillance, the distinction doesn't feel like very much. When the government hires a contractor specifically because they break the spirit of the 4th amendment, it's hard to argue that it's not the government breaking the law.

    • tintor

      today at 7:21 PM

      People die all the time, because of decisions made by private companies.

    • keybored

      today at 10:19 PM

      > The difference is that a government can take personal liberty away from people in the most direct way. A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row. (Hopefully anyway.) So we put a higher standard on government.

      We put higher standards on the government because companies have the biggest propaganda coffers.

      It’s not some rational principle. Money goes in, beliefs come out.

    • mrguyorama

      today at 9:07 PM

      Cops are legally forbidden from surveilling everyone at all times using machines. Explicitly so. Yet, if a company starts up and surveils everyone at all times, and their only customer is Cops, it's all Okay somehow. The cops don't even need a warrant anymore.

      What's worse, is that third party doctrine kills your rights worse than direct police surveillance.

      Imagine if you will, back in the day of film cameras: The company developing your film will tell the police if you give them literal child porn but otherwise they don't. But imagine if they kept a copy of every picture you ever took, just stuffed it into a room in the back, and your receipt included a TOS about you giving them a license to own a copy "for necessary processing". Now, a year after you stopped using film cameras, the cops ask the company for your photos.

      The company hands it over. You don't get to say no. The cops don't need a warrant, even though they 100% need a warrant to walk into your home and grab your stash of photos.

      Why is this at all okay? How did the supreme court not recognize how outright stupid this is?

      We made an explicit rule for video rental stores to not be able to do this! Congress at one time recognized the stupidity and illegal nature of this! Except they only did that because a politician's video rental history was published during his attempt at confirmation.

      That law is direct and clear precedent that service providers should not be able to give your data to the cops without your consent, but this is America so precedent is only allowed to help businesses and cops.

    • bcrosby95

      today at 8:16 PM

      Uh, the government can pay the private company for the data so they can lock those people up.

  • koolba

    today at 9:41 PM

    What would such a ban look like?

    A private company can surely link its own cameras and data to create a private use database of undesirables. I’m certain that Walmart and friends do exactly this already. It’s the large scale version of the Polaroids behind the counter.

    • bad_haircut72

      today at 9:50 PM

      wouldnt "Any person found to have implemented a system which violates the rights of people in xyz way will be punished with imrisonment" work ?

      • koolba

        today at 9:56 PM

        In what way? A business can refuse to service any individual as long as it’s not a direct violation of things like civil rights laws.

  • CGMthrowaway

    today at 6:45 PM

    [flagged]

    • throwaway894345

      today at 6:51 PM

      I would much rather have a democratically elected and constitutionally constrained government than private enterprise with limitless power. It would also be helpful if the “government is bad” people would stop electing the people who seek to sabotage the government.

    • plagiarist

      today at 7:07 PM

      Facial recognition is not a legitimate private enterprise. It is a complete failure of legislation that it is allowed to exist.

      • CGMthrowaway

        today at 7:21 PM

        Apple Face ID is not a good or legitimate feature? You just upset hundreds of millions of people

        • heavyset_go

          today at 7:37 PM

          Most people miss Touch ID on the iPhone.

          • CGMthrowaway

            today at 7:53 PM

            So biometrtics are OK as long as it's not your face? Trying to derive the first principle here.

        • plagiarist

          today at 8:02 PM

          When it's allegedly stored in the Secure Enclave and the data unable to leave the device, it is obviously not the same interaction. I personally would be fine with a law making that distinction with the on-device recognition as legal.

• runlevel1

  today at 7:50 PM

  Just like when Verizon sold its customers' precise location history to data brokers who then sold it to law enforcement agencies.[^1] Laundered.

  [^1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/court-rejects-ve...

• Manuel_D

  today at 9:39 PM

  That's not how the law works in the US. The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself. This is why the Biden administration had a restraining order filed against it, on account of them pressuring social media companies to ban content it didn't like. This violated the First Amendment, despite the fact that it was a third party that was doing the actual banning at the behest of the government.

  The government could legally create its own facial recognition technology if it wanted to. They're not avoiding the law, facial recognition isn't illegal.

  • mothballed

    today at 9:42 PM

    That's pretty much how KYC works. The government can't just willy nilly demand papers of everyone going into the bank to open up an account due to the 4th amendment. So they just make the bank do it so it is a "private" act, and then for instance IRS is authorized to do warrantless seizure on the accounts which are now tied to names that were forced to be revealed under KYC laws.

    • Manuel_D

      today at 9:51 PM

      The government doesn't need a warrant to access bank records, as per the US's banking laws. They just need an administrative subpoena, which doesn't have to be signed off by a judge.

      This is not and example of the government sidestepping laws through a third party. You just don't like the existing laws, and would prefer to make certain things illegal that are presently legal.

      • mothballed

        today at 10:09 PM

        There wouldn't be any identity linked for an anonymous bank account to 'access', were it not for the warrantless search of your papers required under KYC but done via private entity (sidestepping 4th amendment) to open an account. That part is done without even a subpoena.

        That is, the US banking laws force private actors, under color of law, to systematically inspect the papers of those opening an account, which conveniently sidesteps the 4th amendment implication of the government searching the papers themselves at everyone opening an account at the bank. And then allows the government to act on the information of that forced search, even without a warrant.

        ---------- re: below due to throttling -------

        I'm referring to this:

        >The government cannot have a third party take action on its behalf to do something that would be illegal for the government to do itself.

        It is illegal for the government to violate the 4th amendment, whether or not a 'law' beyond what is written in the constitution is present.

        Clearly the government would love to just take all your information directly when you open an account, as that would be even better for them, but due to the 4th amendment they can't do that. But just asking or without a warrant requiring the bank to act on it or reveal it is almost as easy, so they just sidestep that by just requiring via the law the bank to search your papers instead. It's effectively a government imposed search but carried out by a 3rd party.

        --------------------

        >This is just factually wrong. The Bank Secrecy Act specifically requires that banks to provide this info. The 4th amendment does not prohibit this. If a bank refused to provide this required information, the government would go in and get that information directly.

        >Again, no law is being avoided. You just don't like the

        This is not 'just factually wrong.' The bank is doing the search instead of the government. A blanket search of everyone, even without a subpeona, even without an individualized notice, even without any sort of event that would require reporting to the government under the BSA, even then they still are required to search the information even in the instances that it doesn't end up being required to be transmitted to the government.

        • Manuel_D

          today at 10:31 PM

          > Clearly the government would love to just take all your information directly when you open an account, as that would be even better for them, but due to the 4th amendment they can't do that

          This is just factually wrong. The Bank Secrecy Act specifically requires that banks to provide this info. The 4th amendment does not prohibit this. If a bank refused to provide this required information, the government would go in and get that information directly.

          Again, no law is being avoided. You just don't like the law.

        • Manuel_D

          today at 10:18 PM

          Right, but the point is, no law is being avoided. The comment I responded to wrote:

          > Always easier when you can avoid the law and just buy it off the shelf. (Emphasis mine)

          No law is being avoided, neither in your banking example nor in the situation with Clearview. To be sure, people can have whatever opinion on the law that they want. But I do want to make it clear the the government is not "avoiding" any law here.

• duped

  today at 7:03 PM

  This is why we should shun the people that build this stuff. If you take a paycheck to enable fascism, you're a bad person and should be unwelcome in polite society.

I'm sure the anti-vax crowd who were foaming at the mouthes over the vaccine containing tracking chips will explain why this is needed and why its not a big deal.

https://archive.is/3qywb

"Tactical Targeting" - you just know someone's PowerPoint presentation used the word "synergy" in it too.

How long before the bring the price down and local PD's start using it too?

• nsriv

  today at 7:18 PM

  Not sure if you're joking but Clearview's primary customers are local or metro police departments.

local laws forbidding facial recognition tech have never been wiser

• today at 6:34 PM

225k USD per year sells us cheaply!

I keep reading this as “CBS signs…” and can’t help thinking about that uncomfortable possible future moment.

And this right here is why Clearview (and others) should have been torn apart back when they first appeared on stage.

I 'member people who warned about something like this having the potential to be abused for/by the government, we were ridiculed at best, and look where we are now, a couple of years later.

• gostsamo

  today at 5:50 PM

  "This cannot happen here" should be classified as a logical fallacy.

  • dylan604

    today at 6:13 PM

    As stated in many of the comments in my code where some else branch claims this shouldn't be happening

"Tactical Targetting": Whitewash stochastic terrorism to attack brown people before midterms.

There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.

Well, if that's true then employees of the companies that build the tools for all this to happen can also be held responsible, no?

I'm actually an optimist and believe there will come a time whena whole lot of people will deny ever working for Palantir, for Clearview on this and so on.

What you, as a software engineer, help build has an impact on the world. These things couldn't exist if people didn't create and maintain them. I really hope people who work at these companies consider what they're helping to accomplish.

• Manuel_D

  today at 10:10 PM

  > average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.

  What do you mean by this? If a government conscripts "average citizens" into its military then they become valid military targets, sure.

  I'm not why you think this implies that developers working for Palantir or Clearview would become military targets. Palantir builds software for the military. But the people actually using that software are military personnel, not Palantir employees.

• some_random

  today at 8:09 PM

  >There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.

  Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.

  • mikkupikku

    today at 8:54 PM

    Or heroes, if they win.

    • some_random

      today at 9:23 PM

      No, I will continue to call them terrorists or war criminals. You can feel free to lick their boots though.

• the_gastropod

  today at 6:52 PM

  I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.

  I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...

  • throw-qqqqq

    today at 6:58 PM

    > I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.

    Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil”. Many people think they are just following orders without reflecting on their actions.

We need a Constitutional amendment that guarantees a complete right to anonymity at every level: financial, vehicular, travel, etc. This means the government must not take any steps to identify a person or link databases identifying people until there has been a documented crime where the person is a suspect.

Only if an anonymous person or their property is caught in a criminal act may the respective identity be investigated. This should be sufficient to ensure justice. Moreover, the evidence corresponding to the criminal act must be subject to a post-hoc judicial review for the justifiability of the conducted investigation.

Unfortunately for us, the day we stopped updating the Constitution is the day it all started going downhill.

• _3u10

  today at 5:56 PM

  That will be wildly unpopular with both parties and most importantly their constituents. I doubt even the libertarian party should they get the president, house and senate could pull it off

  • OutOfHere

    today at 6:06 PM

    Note that the Amendment would apply only to the government, not to private interests. Even so, i could be unpopular among advertisers and data resellers, e.g. Clearview, who sell to the government. I guess these are what qualify as constituents these days. The people themselves have long been forgotten as being constituents.

  • plagiarist

    today at 7:13 PM

    What do you mean "even" the libertarian party? Libertarians would remove whatever existing laws there are around facial recognition so that companies are free to do whatever they like with the data.

  • catlover76

    today at 5:59 PM

    [dead]

• quantified

  today at 6:26 PM

  Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play. Better to have better disclosure and de-anonymization in some cases. If some live in fear (e.g. of cartels), go after the cartels harder than they go after you.

  • GVIrish

    today at 8:37 PM

    > Maybe. Anonymity is where bad actors play.

    The problem is when the government changes the definition of 'bad actor'.

  • OutOfHere

    today at 6:59 PM

    > Anonymity is where bad actors play

    That is a myth spread by control freaks and power seekers. Yes, bad actors prefer anonymity, but the quoted statement is intended to mislead and deceive because good actors can also prefer strong anonymity. These good actors probably even outnumber bad ones by 10:1. To turn it around, deanonymization is where the bad actors play.

    Also, anonymity can be nuanced. For example, vehicles can still have license plates, but the government would be banned from tracking them in any way until a crime has been committed by a vehicle.

    • quantified

      today at 8:01 PM

      Not sure why you say that statement was intended to deceive?

      Both good and bad actors benefit in the current system from anonymity. If bad actors had their identities revealed, they'd have a lot harder time being a bad actor. Good actors need anonymity because of those bad actors.

  • wat10000

    today at 7:59 PM

    Anonymity is where little bad actors play. The big ones don't need to be anonymous because their nefariousness is legal, or they don't get prosecuted. See: waves vaguely in the direction of the US government.

    That said, the recent waves vaguely in the direction of the US government has demonstrated the weakness of legal restrictions on the government. It's good to have something you can point to when they violate it, but it's too easily ignored. There's no substitute for good governance.

Don't we already have facial recognition technology that isn't based on AI? why is throwing AI into the mix suddenly a reasonable product? Liability wavers?

• dylan604

  today at 6:12 PM

  I think the facial rec systems you're thinking of will recognize faces, but not ID them. They need you to label a face, and then it recognizes that face with a name from there on. Clearview is different in that you can provide it an unknown face and it returns a name. Whether it's just some ML based AI vs an LLM, it's still under the AI umbrella technically.

  • lazide

    today at 6:21 PM

    Uh no? Facial recognition to names has been the bread and butter of facial recognition since the beginning. It’s literally the point.

    • dylan604

      today at 6:27 PM

      There are plenty of facial rec systems. Thinking of systems like in iOS Photos, or any of the other similar photo library systems. I think pretty much everyone would be freaked out if they started IDing people in your local libraries.

      • anigbrowl

        today at 7:55 PM

        Facebook was doing that 10 years ago

      • porridgeraisin

        today at 6:36 PM

        Note that there is no difference in the model or in the training. The only thing needed to convert ios photos into one that IDs people is access to a database mapping name to image. The IDing part is done after the "AI" part, it's just a dot product.

      • joering2

        today at 7:07 PM

        unsure what you mean by starting IDing? Majority business in US does it already, all banks use facial recognition to know who comes through their door (friend who works in IT at Bank of America told me they implemented it cross all Florida branches sometime in 2009), most large chain gas stations as well, so does car rentals, most hotels, etc. I was recently booted out of Mazda Dealership in Florida because 11 years ago in Georgia I sued Toyota Dealership for a lemon sell, and now they both under same ownership and my name came up on "no business" alert when I entered their offices.

      • lazide

        today at 6:31 PM

        Huh? What relevance does that have with the discussion?

• porridgeraisin

  today at 6:21 PM

  After the literal first one which just measured distance between nose and mouth and stuff like that from the 1960s, everything else has been based on AI.

  If my memory serves me, we had a PCA and LDA based one in the 90s and then the 2000s we had a lot of hand-woven adaboosts and (non AI)SIFTs. This is where 3D sensors proved useful, and is the basis for all scifi potrayals of facial recognition(a surface depth map drawn on the face).

  In the 2010s, when deep learning became feasible, facial recognition as well as all other AI started using an end to end neural network. This is what is used to this day. It is the first iteration pretty much to work flawlessly regardless of lighting, angle and what not. [1]

  Note about the terms AI, ML, Signal processing:

  In any given era:

  - whatever data-fitting/function approximation method is the latest one is typically called AI.

  - the previous generation one is called ML

  - the really old now boring ones are called signal processing

  Sometimes the calling-it-ML stage is skipped.

  [1] All data fitting methods are only as good as the data. Most of these were trained on caucasian people initially so many of them were not as good for other people. These days the ones deployed by Google photos and stuff of course works for other races as well, but many models don't.

Wear a face mask in public. Got it.

• estebank

  today at 6:19 PM

  I think anything short of fully obscuring your face (a-la ICE-agent/stormtrooper) will be merely a mitigation and not 100% successful. I recall articles talking about face recognition being used "successfully" on people wearing surgical masks in China. In the US they ask you to remove face masks in places where face recognition is used (at the border, TSA checkpoints), but would be unsurprised if that isn't strictly needed in most cases (but asking people to remove it preemptively ends up being faster for throughput).

  • quantified

    today at 6:23 PM

    Probably room to add little cheek pads or other shape-shifters under the mask.

    • verdverm

      today at 6:43 PM

      You have to change how you walk and sounds as well

      • lotsofpulp

        today at 6:51 PM

        99.9% of people walk around with an electronic device that identifies them. If a particular person doesn’t, it should be trivial to filter out all the people that it couldn’t have been, leaving only a small list of possible people.

• nullocator

  today at 8:07 PM

  Your gait I think is more useful than your face is anyways and my understanding is it's my difficult to disguise. So you'll need a wheel chair/scooter and a mask in public.

  • ajcp

    today at 8:30 PM

    Putting a rock in your shoe instantly changes your gait signature.

    • mrguyorama

      today at 9:23 PM

      Thank you Corey Doctorow and "Little Brother". That book was prescient. And free.

      Frankly, I never imagined when I read that decades ago, that it could be underselling the horror.

• dylan604

  today at 6:13 PM

  Aren't we back to where this is illegal again, unless you're an ICE agent.

  • lenerdenator

    today at 6:17 PM

    "Hey man, doctor's orders. Gotta wear it to get allergy relief. And no, can't ask about it... HIPAA stuff."

    • hackingonempty

      today at 6:47 PM

      It is not a good idea to lie to an employee of the USA.

      https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001

      • lenerdenator

        today at 8:24 PM

        Who said it's a lie? It's also not a good idea to operate a police state.

    • FireBeyond

      today at 6:37 PM

      Sadly, I'm sure that will go over "not well" with ICE agents who will happily assault you for carrying a phone...

      • seanw444

        today at 6:53 PM

        I disagree with the shooting too, but this is such a massive oversimplification of the event.

        • FireBeyond

          today at 10:37 PM

          Alright, I'll rephrase - "ICE agents have shown a bias towards escalation than de-escalation in conflict situations, be it pepper spray, assault, detention, or worse. I think that trying to get into a shouting match with them about HIPAA violations on removing your face mask are not likely to result in "okay, carry on, as you were"."

    • dylan604

      today at 6:40 PM

      "I'll show you mine if you show me yours"

• adi_kurian

  today at 8:00 PM

  If you have not yet heard of it, look into gait recognition. Any battle for anonymity is a losing one, it appears.

  • lenerdenator

    today at 8:26 PM

    In that case, guess it's time to start thinking of ways to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence they've gathered upon us.

[flagged]

• j45

  today at 5:46 PM

  Wired still seems to write some good pieces.

• laweijfmvo

  today at 6:17 PM

  are you using a vpn or something like that that might look like “you” have read wired articles?

• toomuchtodo

  today at 6:05 PM

  I subscribe to keep the reporting going. Journalism costs money.

  Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982633 - February 2026

  (ProPublica, 404media, APM Marketplace, Associated Press, Vox, Block Club Chicago, Climate Town, Tampa Bay Times, etc get my journalism dollars as well)

  • skiman10

    today at 8:10 PM

    Are we the same person?

    I subbed to Wired last year during a sale and uh... I was never given a premium account linked to my email and support would never answer me. I signed up for the print edition as well and never received any of those. I was getting their newsletter though and that was new. Then I emailed to cancel when I got a billing notification to my email and they were able to cancel it just fine so apparently I did have an account? And then like two weeks ago I received the latest print edition.

    Truly have no idea what that was about, but anyway glad to see someone else out here supporting almost all the same news orgs as me (404media is amazing!)

  • johnnyanmac

    today at 9:00 PM

    >Journalism costs money.

    They've sold out for years already, maybe decades. Why fund them now when the corruption is out in the open?

    AP is really one of the few places I'd even consider donating to at this point.

[flagged]

[flagged]

• Manuel_D

  today at 8:50 PM

  None of your links allege that Hoan Ton-That or Richard Schwartz is a white supremacist. What the Huffington Post piece does allege, is that for 3 weeks Smartcheckr (a different LLC that would later have its assets transferred to Clearview AI) hired one Douglass Mackey. Douglass Mackey had an online alias "Richard Vaughn" that was used to post white supremacist content. Ton-That states that he was unaware that Mackey was the real person behind Richard Vaughn.

  There's a vast gulf between "Clearview AI was founeded by white supremacists" and "Smartcheckr, which later merged with Clearview AI, employed for 3 weeks someone who posted white supremacist content under a pseudonym, unbeknownst to the Clearview AI founders".

  In fact, neither the Buzzfeed article nor the NYTimes piece accuse anyone of white supremacy.

  • text0404

    today at 8:54 PM

    SmartCheckr was founded/owned by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz. So they transferred the assets of a company they already founded/owned to another company that they founded/owned: "Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz after transferring the assets of another company, SmartCheckr, which the pair originally founded in 2017 alongside Charles C. Johnson" [0].

    Other notable white supremacists with material ties in the article:

    Chuck Johnson [1] collaborated with Ton-That and "in contact about scraping social media platforms for the facial recognition business." Ran a white supremacist site (GotNews) and white supremacist crowd funding sites.

    Douglass Mackey [2] a white supremacist who consulted for the company.

    Tyler Bass [3] an employee and member of multiple white supremacist groups and Unite the Right attendee.

    Marko Jukic [4], employee and syndicated author in a publication by white supremacist Richard Spencer.

    The article also goes into the much larger ecosystem of AI and facial recognition tech and its ties to white supremacists and the far-right. So there are not just direct ties to Clearview AI itself, but a network of surveillance companies who are ideologically and financially tied to the founders and associates.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearview_AI

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_C._Johnson

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglass_Mackey

    [3] https://gizmodo.com/creepy-face-recognition-firm-clearview-a...

    [4] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/clearview-ai-im...

    • Manuel_D

      today at 9:01 PM

      Again, if you want to allege that these other people are white supremacists go right ahead.

      But you wrote that "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists". Even after your new set of links, this remains unsubstantiated. None of your links allege that the Clearview founders are white supremacists, they make an attempt at guilt by association.

      • text0404

        today at 9:05 PM

        You're right, my apologies. I've edited the original from "Clearview AI was founded by white supremacists" to "Clearview AI was founded by people with close ties to white supremacy and even employed some." Thanks for the correction!

• forshaper

  today at 8:00 PM

  Did you mean Vietnamese supremacist?

  • text0404

    today at 8:02 PM

    Nope. I meant white supremacist [1]. Notice I didn't say smart white supremacist.

    [1] https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5e8cc7922300005600169bd...

    • mothballed

      today at 8:07 PM

      They hired weev? Can you point out to where he founded or worked for the company?

      • text0404

        today at 8:11 PM

        [flagged]

        • today at 8:18 PM

[flagged]

• runako

  today at 6:05 PM

  This is exactly, precisely the opposite of what the impact will be.

  For example:

  - every technology has false positives. False positives here will mean 4th amendment violations and will add an undue burden on people who share physical characteristics with those in the training data. (This is the updated "fits the description."

  - this technology will predictably be used to enable dragnets in particular areas. Those areas will not necessarily be chosen on any rational basis.

  - this is all predictable because we have watched the War on Drugs for 3 generations. We have all seen how it was a tactical militaristic problem in cities and became a health concern/addiction issues problem when enforced in rural areas. There is approximately zero chance this technology becomes the first use of law enforcement that applies laws evenly.

• Refreeze5224

  today at 6:22 PM

  Not only is this incredibly naive, it misses that whole "consent of the governed" thing. I don't want AI involved in policing. They are bad enough and have so little accountability without "computer says so" to fall back on, That's all AI will do, make a bad situation worse.

• rhcom2

  today at 6:03 PM

  The targets for the AI are still set by humans, the data the AI was trained on is still created by humans. Involving a computer in the system doesn't magically make it less biased.

  • charcircuit

    today at 6:11 PM

    That is true for now, but eventually it should be possible for it to be more autonomous without needing humans to set its target.

    • throwway120385

      today at 8:46 PM

      That's just what we need, an AI that was trained on biased data and then empowered to do whatever it wants autonomously. It's a pity we can't look to any examples of human intelligences that have been trained on biased data and then empowered to do whatever they want autonomously.

    • pixl97

      today at 7:12 PM

      Ah yes, we'll call the system Skynet.

• aunty_helen

  today at 5:58 PM

  Same could be said about the computer systems that have been developed in the last 20 years. But that hasn’t happened…

• monknomo

  today at 5:59 PM

  are you sure it won't enabled targeted enforcement for people law enforcement finds irritating, more than evenly applied law? It's still people setting the priorities and exercising discretion about charging.

  • charcircuit

    today at 6:06 PM

    It should be easier to audit since you would have a list of who broke the law, but action had not been taken yet.

    • monknomo

      today at 6:58 PM

      do you think the records of the vast number of police departments and agencies would be combinable with the separate court records, as well as the facial recognition access data source (if it exists?)

      I think that is pretty unlikely

• HPsquared

  today at 5:58 PM

  I wonder how many laws and sentencing guidelines etc are formulated with an implicit assumption that most of the time, people aren't caught.

  • cucumber3732842

    today at 5:59 PM

    In my estimation all of the criminal ones and at least half of the civil ones.

  • charcircuit

    today at 5:59 PM

    I think it will reveal unfair laws and as a society we will have to rebalance things that had such an assumption in place.

• duped

  today at 8:54 PM

  We can't even make hand driers that don't discriminate on the basis of race. You think making complex law enforcement decisions based on data is going to be easier?

• mrguyorama

  today at 6:02 PM

  None of the destruction of your rights has lead to improvement in clearance rates.

  Crimes aren't solved, despite having a literal panopticon. This view is just false.

  Cops are choosing to not do their job. Giving them free access to all private information hasn't fixed that.

  • charcircuit

    today at 6:08 PM

    Then cops should be taken out of the core law enforcement agentic loop. There could be a new role of people who the AI dispatches instead to do law enforcement work in the real world.

    • Refreeze5224

      today at 6:23 PM

      I think you fundamentally misunderstand what the role of the police is. They protect property, the owning class, and the status quo. Laws are just a tool for them to do that. Equal justice for all is not a goal for them, and AI will not provide more of it.

    • pixl97

      today at 7:16 PM

      The thing is if you have a truly fair AI you start catching the Trumps and Musks of this world in their little underaged trists. How long do you think that system would actually stay running for?

      The thing you're missing is our system is working exactly like it's supposed to for rich people.

• iLoveOncall

  today at 6:02 PM

  Meanwhile all AI face recognition software works poorely on non-caucasians.

  • dylan604

    today at 6:14 PM

    With this administration, I think that is a feature not a bug

• preisschild

  today at 8:45 PM

  Yeah its not like the "AI" manufacturers have their own biases that are reflected in the model.

  For example, Deepseek won't give you critical information about the communist party and Grok won't criticise Elon Musk

• mindslight

  today at 6:06 PM

  Why do you write so many low-effort, disingenuous, inflammatory comments? They're "not even wrong", yet they just suck energy right out of productive discussion as people inevitably respond to one part of your broken framing, and then they're off to the races arguing about nonsense.

  The main problem with the law not being applied evenly is structural - how do you get the people tasked with enforcing the law to enforce the law against their own ingroup? "AI" and the surveillance society will not solve this, rather they are making it ten times worse.

  • charcircuit

    today at 6:42 PM

    I want to share my opinion even if I know that it may not be a popular one on HN. I am not trying to maximize my reputation by always posting what I believe will get the most upvotes, but instead I prioritize sharing my opinion.

    >people inevitably respond to one part of your broken framing, and then they're off to the races arguing about nonsense.

    I agree that this unproductive. When people have two very different viewpoints it is hard for that gap to be bridged. I don't want to lay out my entire world view and argument from fist principals because it would take too much time and I doubt anyone would read it. Call it low effort if you want, but at least discussions don't turn into a collection of a single belief.

    >how do you get the people tasked with enforcing the law to enforce the law against their own ingroup?

    Ultimately law enforcement is responsible to the people so if the people don't want it then it will be hard to change. In regards to avoiding ingroup preference it would be worth coming up with ways of auditing cases that are not being looked into and having AI try to find patterns in what is causing it. The summaries of these patterns could be made public to allow voters and other officals to react to such information and apply needed changes to the system.

    • throwway120385

      today at 8:51 PM

      I think a good first step to policing the police is to have any use of violence by law enforcement be put to trial in court. They would have all of the same constitutional protections as any other defendant and "I was an officer of the law carrying out my duty" would be a reasonable mitigating factor. There would be no need to jail them or require bond or arraignment or any of that, but they would have to show up for the trial and demonstrate why use of force was necessary.

  • anigbrowl

    today at 8:04 PM

    They're "not even wrong", yet they just suck energy right out of productive discussion

    You answered your own question - it's straight up bait.

• Ar-Curunir

  today at 6:04 PM

  LE has been getting increasingly advanced technology over the years. The only thing that’s increased is their ability to repress and oppress.

  Go lick boots elsewhere.

Skynet. "You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable."