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Who are the Sedition Hunters?
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The Sedition Hunters’ analysis of social media posts is fairly anodyne. Where the Sedition Hunters go further is in using PimEyes, a controversial facial recognition software. Individuals upload a photograph of someone’s face to the service, then PimEyes analyzes it and compares it against a database with almost one billion photographs. (Enter a photo of yourself here if you’re curious what they’ve collected on you, but we can almost guarantee that you won’t like what you find.)
Anyone can appear in the database, as the images have been pulled from the internet without the original poster’s knowledge. In seconds, PimEyes can turn any internet user into an FBI agent running sophisticated facial recognition software, and privacy protections are all but nonexistent. Users can even set up alerts so that they can be notified whenever a new photograph of a particular person is posted on the internet.
The technology is highly controversial, and rightfully so. A similar company, Clearview AI, scraped more than 3 billion photos and videos from the internet by 2019 and created their own facial recognition database. Marketing to law enforcement, they sold their product to more than 600 agencies in America. Clearly, they had created something extremely powerful, yet at no point did they face scrutiny from regulators or have to worry about privacy protections. There is nothing preventing a company from downloading every photograph or video of a person’s face on the internet, creating a private database, powering it with advanced facial recognition technology, and releasing it to the world. Every time someone posts a photo to ********, they’re unwittingly building out their facial recognition profile.
Are the Sedition Hunters heroes or criminals?
PimEyes eases the Sedition Hunters’ work, but it may complicate their legacy. Openly-accessible facial recognition technology is aiding law enforcement in this instance, but it could threaten any semblance of privacy in years to come. An early investor in Clearview told the New York Times “I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy… Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”
Maybe you can’t ban it, but you can absolutely regulate it. In Europe, the ??General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) established sweeping guidelines on how data can be handled, and promised significantly greater oversight. The United States should consider its own comprehensive data regulations to establish clear limitations on how private citizens and public entities can use personal data.
If an American wants their personal photographs and likeness to be removed from publicly-accessible facial recognition services, it should be their right. While law enforcement agencies should certainly be granted more privileges to retain major databases, even they should face scrutiny for potential abuses. Data protections are severely lacking, and we won’t like where we find ourselves in a few years if we don’t work proactively to protect personal privacy.
At the moment, the Sedition Hunters are doing the federal government a great service, and they should be celebrated for their efforts and resourcefulness. Yet their tactics should serve as a warning: online facial recognition software is turning everyday Americans into capable FBI agents, and there is nothing to prevent them from abusing that power.
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