Posted on 02/08/2021 5:22:05 PM PST by nickcarraway
Plus: Check if your Flickr photos are in facial recognition engines and and the list of NSFW words for AI
Canada’s privacy watchdog has found Clearview AI in “clear violation” of the country’s privacy laws, and has told the facial-recognition startup to stop scraping images of Canadians and delete all existing photos it has on those citizens.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada launched an official investigation into the upstart’s practices, and as a result Clearview stopped selling its software to Canadian police.
“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,” 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.
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 told the NYT. “The potential for harm seemed too great.”
You can use the tool 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 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 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 llicense 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.
You can read more about it here. ®
Yeah, right. They’ll get right on it.
This is a deception. The Canadian government and, now, the USA government are very happy to have any social media platform to use facial recognition, AND have it available to government agencies.
Canada is a founding member of 5 eyes which uses other countries to spy on their citizens and therefore can say, “We didn’t spy on our people.
5 Eyes was used to spy on President Trump and then have another 5 Eyes country report what they saw. This cost the top Brit spy dog his job when this data came out.
With Biden, Dr Pepper Jill and Susan Rice controlling our part of 5 eyes, we will spy on Canadians, Brits, Aussies and Kiwis communication and let them know who said what, where and when.
5 Eyes:
Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council (FIORC)www.dni.gov › ... › About › Organization › ICIG Pages
FIORC was created in the spirit of the existing Five Eyes partnership, the intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Newly Disclosed NSA Documents Shed Further Light on Five ...www.lawfareblog.com › newly-disclosed-nsa-document...
Mar 25, 2019 — The Five Eyes alliance emerged from spying arrangements forged during World War II and facilitates the sharing of signals intelligence (SIGINT) ...
RESOLVED: Japan Is Ready to Become a Formal Member of ...www.csis.org › analysis › resolved-japan-ready-become...
Dec 8, 2020 — Under Suga, Japan’s addition as the “Sixth Eye” in “Five Eyes”—an intelligence-sharing alliance including the United Kingdom, the United States, ...
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada launched an official investigation into the upstart’s practices, and as a result Clearview stopped selling its software to Canadian police.
“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,” 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.
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.
Well, if the company doesn’t want to obey the laws of another country, they don’t have to. Until any leader of that company crosses the border and is arrested for their choices.
Funny thing, laws that can be flouted in one nation can be enforced the second you enter that land.
Then again, this is Canada. We’re STILL waiting on the US gov’t to deal with the Huawei director we arrested at the State Department’s request them years ago.
Bingo! AS IF governments are going to delete those images and associated databases. It’s a massive head start to Big Brother.
Cloak your photos with this AI privacy tool to fool facial recognition
100% chance every state ID in the world has been sold to dozens of A.I. facial recognition databases.
Mistakes are being made, whether by AI or weaponized autistics.
‘Needs to Stop:’ Internet Users Misidentify Retired Chicago Firefighter as Riot Suspect
The retired firefighter on Friday called for the internet sleuths who misidentified him to be held accountable
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/needs-to-stop-internet-users-misidentify-retired-chicago-firefighter-as-riot-suspect/2417255/
The wrong ID: Retired firefighter, comedian and Chuck Norris falsely accused of being Capitol rioters
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/sleuths-falsely-identify-rioters/
There is a movie, I think on Netflix or Amazon Prime, called “The Last Days of American Crime”. It is a feature film, not a documentary, about the USA using technology that sends a signal into the human brain preventing the citizens (but not the Federal Agents) from committing any act they know to be wrong. It’s about a small band of outlaws trying to outwit the system and get away with one last massive heist at the very last minute.
The thing of it is, Canada refuses to employ this technology so many Americans try to flee to Canada. They mostly get shot at the border by American troops. But there is a sign at the Ambassador bridge that connects Michigan to Canada that says something like “Welcome to Canada: Home of the Free”. Ironic.
Chuck Norris? One riot, one Texas Ranger.
If government says it, it must be true, mentality.< P> I really hope there is God to punish evil and the whole country goes to hell!
I am a Canadian!
Enough that his agent had to make a statement.
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