What if a stranger could snap your picture on the sidewalk then use an app to quickly discover your name, address and other details? A startup called Clearview AI has made that possible, and its app is currently being used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies in the US, including the FBI, says a Saturday report in The New York Times.

The app, says the Times, works by comparing a photo to a database of more than 3 billion pictures that Clearview says it’s scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared. A name might easily be unearthed, and from there other info could be dug up online.

The size of the Clearview database dwarfs others in use by law enforcement. The FBI’s own database, which taps passport and driver’s license photos, is one of the largest, with over 641 million images of US citizens.

The Clearview app isn’t currently available to the public, but the Times says police officers and Clearview investors think it will be in the future.

The startup said in a statement Tuesday that its “technology is intended only for use by law enforcement and security personnel. It is not intended for use by the general public.”

Source: Clearview app lets strangers find your name, info with snap of a photo, report says – CNET

Using the system involves uploading photos to Clearview AI’s servers, and it’s unclear how secure these are. Although Clearview AI says its customer-support employees will not look at the photos that are uploaded, it appeared to be aware that Kashmir Hill (the Times journalist investigating the piece) was having police search for her face as part of her reporting:

While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

The Times reports that the system appears to have gone viral with police departments, with over 600 already signed up. Although there’s been no independent verification of its accuracy, Hill says the system was able to identify photos of her even when she covered the lower half of her face, and that it managed to find photographs of her that she’d never seen before.

One expert quoted by The Times said that the amount of money involved with these systems means that they need to be banned before the abuse of them becomes more widespread. “We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,” said a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, Woodrow Hartzog, “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

Source: The Verge

It should come as little surprise that any content you offer to the web for public consumption has the potential to be scraped and misused by anyone clever enough to do it. And while that doesn’t make this weekend’s report from The New York Times any less damning, it’s a great reminder about how important it is to really go through the settings for your various social networks and limit how your content is, or can be, accessed by anyone.

I won’t get too deep into the Times’ report; it’s worth reading on its own, since it involves a company (Clearview AI) scraping more than three billion images from millions of websites, including Facebook, and creating a facial-recognition app that does a pretty solid job of identifying people using images from this massive database.

Even though Clearview’s scraping techniques technically violate the terms of service on a number of websites, that hasn’t stopped the company from acquiring images en masse. And it keeps whatever it finds, which means that turning all your online data private isn’t going to help if Clearview has already scanned and grabbed your photos.

Still, something is better than nothing. On Facebook, likely the largest stash of your images, you’re going to want to visit Settings > Privacy and look for the option described: “Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile?”

Turn that off, and Clearview won’t be able to grab your images. That’s not the setting I would have expected to use, I confess, which makes me want to go through all of my social networks and rethink how the information I share with them flows out to the greater web.

Lock down your Facebook even more with these settings

Since we’re already here, it’s worth spending a few minutes wading through Facebook’s settings and making sure as much of your content is set to friends-only as possible. That includes changing “Who can see your future posts” to “friends,” using the “Limit Past Posts” option to change everything you’ve previously posted to friends-only, and making sure that only you can see your friends list—to prevent any potential scraping and linking that some third-party might attempt. Similarly, make sure only your friends (or friends of friends) can look you up via your email address or phone number. (You never know!)

You should then visit the “Timeline and Tagging” settings page and make a few more changes. That includes only allowing friends to see what other people post on your timeline, as well as posts you’re tagged in. And because I’m a bit sensitive about all the crap people tag me in on Facebook, I’d turn on the “Review” options, too. That won’t help your account from being scraped, but it’s a great way to exert more control over your timeline.

Finally, even though it also doesn’t prevent companies from scraping your account, pull up the “Public posts” section of Facebook’s settings page and limit who is allowed to follow you (if you desire). You should also restrict who can comment or like your public information, like posts or other details about your life you share openly on the service.

Once I fix Facebook, then what?

Here’s the annoying part. Were I you, I’d take an afternoon or evening and write out all the different places I typically share snippets of my life online. For most, maybe that’s probably a handful of social services: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, et cetera.

Once you’ve created your list, I’d dig deep into the settings of each service and see what options you have, if any, for limiting the availability of your content. This might run contrary to how you use the service—if you’re trying to gain lots of Instagram followers, for example, locking your profile to “private” and requiring potential followers to request access might slow your attempts to become the next big Insta-star. However, it should also prevent anyone with a crafty scraping utility to mass-download your photos (and associate them with you, either through some fancy facial-recognition tech, or by linking them to your account).

Source: Change These Facebook Settings to Protect Your Photos From Facial Recognition Software