Your face for sale

If you are like me, you probably get annoyed when you are waiting in the TSA pre-check line and a Clear person gets shuffled in front of you in line.

If you are really like me, you also get freaked out by the thought that the Clear person just consented to have their face scanned in order to be part of the Clear service.

And now if you are just like me, you say "no thank you" to the face scan that's become standard at TSA.

You see, when it comes to sketchy companies in the world, its hard to think of one worse that Clearview AI - the company behind the Clear airport service.

Clearview is like the Google of facial recognition and its main customers are law enforcement and government agencies like TSA, the FBI, and Homeland Security.

They originally wanted to sell their vast facial recognition database to private businesses like hotels, grocery stores, shopping centers, etc. It didn’t work, but I doubt they have stopped trying.

In order to build its comprehensive database of faces, Clearview scraped the public internet ingesting billions of photos, using everything from social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Linked to Venmo. It didn’t stop there, it also scraped just about every Internet service from news sites to government agencies. If there is a picture of you somewhere on the Internet, chances are, its in Clearview AI's database.

There are reportedly 30 billion faces and counting in the Clearview AI database.

All those pictures are in the the Clearview AI database without our actual consent — no one gave express permission to Clearview to use the images they are using.

"Whats the harm?" you ask. Well besides the initial use of our most private data without consent, consider there have already been people mistaken of crimes they did not commit. Unauthorized use is another big concern.

It's also only a matter of time, if it has not happened already, that hackers get access to this data.

Some countries understand the privacy concerns Clearview presents for its citizens. ClearView is banned in Europe, Canada and Australia (where Clearview AI's founder Hoan Ton-That is from)

Here in America - our government is Clearview's biggest customer.

As a society we seemingly have all been happy to trade away our rights to privacy and civil liberties one by one for conveniences.

Does anyone care?

Credit to New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill for her research and her excellent book on this subject - Your Face Belongs to Us. Also credit to the following article on The Verge