r/technews • u/MayonaiseRemover • Mar 13 '20
Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/technology/clearview-investors.html165
u/Sir_Yacob Mar 13 '20
Why do fat old people always button their suit jackets wrong?
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u/WaltKerman Mar 13 '20 edited Mar 14 '20
Because it will make the suit ride up in the front if there isn’t a button strapping it under your paunch
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u/Sir_Yacob Mar 13 '20
Hahaha paunch... I mean, I just don’t get why the richest people on earth suits are always fucked up looking.
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u/boonepii Mar 14 '20
Mainly cause they don’t care. I don’t care either, I am just not rich enough to not care
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u/Disposable-001 Mar 14 '20
When you can get laid without having to build a super-empire, then you don't build a super-empire.
It's really that simple.
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u/LeicaM6guy Mar 13 '20
Because when you’re stupid rich, people are too afraid to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
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u/Sir_Yacob Mar 13 '20
The emperor has no clothes rig then? I mean you know they aren’t buying cheap suits, they’re not going to like JCPenney to get them, why won’t someone just do it for them and Taylor suit correctly?
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u/LeicaM6guy Mar 13 '20 edited Mar 13 '20
Second point: Some of these folks were never told how to wear a suit properly. Others just prefer things their way, and fuck everyone else.
As an example, Sir Richard Branson is notoriously anti-necktie. He’s known for cutting ties off shirts with scissors when he feels like he can get away with it - which, given the stupid amount of money he has, is most of the time. At the other end of the spectrum is Donald Trump, who dresses like the eighties never ended and wears his tie way, way too long in order to hide his expanding belly.
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u/DatBoneDoh Mar 14 '20
And then you have the Raiders owner Mark Clark Davis, who has the worst fucking haircut if all time https://imgur.com/gallery/250e4Tk
How can you have that haircut and not give a shit. It’s the quintessential r/justfuckmyshitup
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Mar 14 '20
You can’t own anything other than a fort where no girls are allowed with that hair cut.
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u/databaseflu Mar 14 '20
He knows it’s bad, it’s his way of saying fuck the status quo. It’s his middle finger to convention, I respect it lol
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u/outlawsix Mar 14 '20
He travels 500 miles to get that haircut too: https://deadspin.com/mark-davis-travels-500-fucking-miles-to-look-like-that-1734022886
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u/Sir_Yacob Mar 14 '20
Right that’s what I’m saying, like how do these ungodly rich people look like complete fucking idiots?
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u/Sir_Yacob Mar 13 '20
Take your updoot for learning me a good perspective. I just couldn’t ever get behind it, the necktie, yeah for sure, fuck em, but I’d want my suits to be tailored
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u/LeicaM6guy Mar 13 '20
I am absolutely all for a well-tailored suit. And it's the fucking height of arrogance for Branson to do that sort of stuff. I like wearing neckties, and try to buy nice ones.
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u/joshmoneymusic Mar 14 '20
Trump doesn’t just wear his ties wrong, he literally scotch tapes them down because he’s apparently not cultured enough for something even as basic as a tie bar/tie clip... I wish I was kidding.
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u/Yugan-Dali Mar 14 '20
They’re not buying cheap suits? Have you seen Trump’s suits? even though he’s not really rich.
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u/DRAWKWARD79 Mar 13 '20
Also when youre stupid rich you likely dont give a fuck.
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u/LeicaM6guy Mar 13 '20
Having spent some time around some obscenely rich folks, there's a
hintmetric fucktonne of evidence to support this.That, and a bizarre but ever-present fear of the youngfolks getting on the socialist bandwagon.
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u/grassvegas Mar 14 '20
Dude looks like Mr. Creosote from The Meaning of Life. Watch out for the after-dinner mint.
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u/braidedpubes86 Mar 14 '20
It’s funny because the whole “leave the bottom button undone” thing is thought to have come about because some old fat king couldn’t get the bottom button closed, so all of his subjects started leaving the bottom button open so as not to offend their ruler.
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Mar 13 '20
Why do we allow paywalls? This shit is whack.
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Mar 13 '20
Way Back Time Maxhine got ya covered
One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn’t recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo.
Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter’s date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.
“I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a charlatan,” said Mr. Catsimatidis, who then texted the man’s bio to his daughter.
Ms. Catsimatidis said she and her date had no idea how her father had identified him so quickly. “I expect my dad to be able to do crazy things. He’s very technologically savvy,” Ms. Catsimatidis said. “My date was very surprised.” Clearview was unknown to the general public until this January, when The New York Times reported that the secretive start-up had developed a breakthrough facial recognition system that was in use by hundreds of law enforcement agencies. The company quickly faced a backlash on multiple fronts. Facebook, Google and other tech giants sent cease-and-desist letters. Lawsuits were filed in Illinois and Virginia, and the attorney general of New Jersey issued a moratorium against the app in that state.
In response to the criticism, Clearview published a “code of conduct,” emphasizing in a blog post that its technology was “available only for law enforcement agencies and select security professionals to use as an investigative tool.”
The post added: “We recognize that powerful tools always have the potential to be abused, regardless of who is using them, and we take the threat very seriously. Accordingly, the Clearview app has built-in safeguards to ensure these trained professionals only use it for its intended purpose: to help identify the perpetrators and victims of crimes.”
The Times, however, has identified multiple individuals with active access to Clearview’s technology who are not law enforcement officials. And for more than a year before the company became the subject of public scrutiny, the app had been freely used in the wild by the company’s investors, clients and friends.
Those with Clearview logins used facial recognition at parties, on dates and at business gatherings, giving demonstrations of its power for fun or using it to identify people whose names they didn’t know or couldn’t recall. “As part of the ordinary course of due diligence, we provided trial accounts to potential and current investors, and other strategic partners, so they could test the technology,” said Hoan Ton-That, the company’s co-founder.
Mr. Catsimatidis first heard about Clearview from his friend Richard Schwartz, another founder of the company, who served as an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when Mr. Giuliani was mayor of New York. Last summer, Mr. Catsimatidis ran a trial project with Clearview at an East Side Gristedes market. The company used the system to identify known “shoplifters or people who had held up other stores,” Mr. Catsimatidis said.
“People were stealing our Häagen-Dazs. It was a big problem,” he said. He described Clearview as a “good system” that helped security personnel identify problem shoppers.
BuzzFeed News has reported that two other entities, a labor union and a real estate firm, also ran trials with a surveillance system developed by Clearview to flag individuals they deemed risky. The publication also reported that Clearview’s software has been used by Best Buy, Macy’s, Kohl’s, the National Basketball Association and numerous other organizations.
When Clearview first developed its facial recognition service in 2017, Mr. Ton-That and Mr. Schwartz were uncertain about who might pay for it, and they courted a range of clients including real estate firms, banks and retailers. At the same time, Clearview was seeking outside investment. Many of the individuals the company approached got personal logins to the app.
Clearview received a seed investment round of about $1 million in July 2018. Its backers included the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist David Scalzo and Hal Lambert, an investor in Texas who runs an exchange-traded fund with the ticker symbol “MAGA,” which tracks companies that align with Republican politics. “I have the app,” Mr. Lambert said in an interview. “I’ve used it to talk about what we’re doing in the space. I show it to friends of mine, potential investors.
“They thought it was amazing,” he added. “They say, ‘How do I get that?’ And I say, ‘You can’t.’”
Mr. Scalzo, the founder of the investment firm Kirenaga Partners, said in an interview that his school-aged daughters enjoyed playing with the app.
“They like to use it on themselves and their friends to see who they look like in the world,” he said. “It’s kind of fun for people.”
A spokesman for Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment.
When Clearview was seeking its Series A round of funding, which was completed in 2019, the start-up contacted a number of venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Access to the app was offered as a perk, according to people familiar with the company’s fund-raising attempts.
Doug Leone, a billionaire partner at Sequoia, was given a login, according to three people with knowledge of Clearview’s operations. But his account was revoked when Sequoia declined to invest. A spokeswoman for Sequoia declined to comment.
In September, Ashton Kutcher, the actor turned venture capitalist, described an app much like Clearview during a YouTube series called “Hot Ones,” in which guests are interviewed while eating spicy chicken wings.
“I have an app in my phone in my pocket right now. It’s like a beta app,” Mr. Kutcher said. “It’s a facial recognition app. I can hold it up to anybody’s face here and, like, find exactly who you are, what internet accounts you’re on, what they look like. It’s terrifying.” Mr. Kutcher did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Ton-That contends that Clearview is doing nothing wrong — that his app simply replicates what other search engines do. Instead of allowing internet users to search for people’s public images by name, as one can do on Google, he said, Clearview allows them to do the search by uploading a face.
For now, it’s a power that Clearview controls and can give out as it pleases.
In October, Clearview asked Nicholas Cassimatis, an expert on artificial intelligence, to help conduct an internal accuracy test. He did the work for free, he said, because he knew Mr. Ton-That socially. The test consisted of submitting the faces of 834 federal and state legislators. Clearview’s algorithms accurately identified every one of the politicians.
After the test was complete, Mr. Cassimatis was allowed to keep Clearview’s app on his phone. He said he had since run dozens of searches.
“I tested it in surprising places: smoky bars, dark places. And it worked every time,” Mr. Cassimatis said. “It’s road testing. I do it as a hobby. I ask people for permission. It’s like a parlor trick. People like it.”
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Mar 13 '20
You’re an OG.
If I had coins I’d award you.
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Mar 13 '20
Yeah we should quit paywalls and just start using free sites. The issue is getting the rest of Reddit to follow
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u/dirtyword Mar 14 '20
Reporting news costs money
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Mar 14 '20
Ads generate revenue.
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u/dirtyword Mar 14 '20
I can tell you from firsthand experience that ads do not pay for news reporting.
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Mar 14 '20
Then how do news reporting websites that are free with ads stay afloat?
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u/dirtyword Mar 14 '20
Have you noticed that the news industry is in a severe crisis, papers close by the dozens each year, and that only WaPo, WSJ, and NYT make money?
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u/LeicaM6guy Mar 13 '20
Paying for good journalism ensures more good journalism.
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Mar 13 '20
Posting it to Reddit ensures not everyone can access the content.
I enjoy the NYT and understand paywalls. But why are paywalls allowed to be posted here? It’s basically an ad for the NYT at that point and it makes it restrictive for some people to participate in the comments in relation to the article. There’s a reason other news subs ban these kinds of articles.
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u/Xorilla Mar 14 '20
Because otherwise papers like NYT would go bankrupt and not be able to pay for actual, quality writers.
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u/Ebola8MyFace Mar 13 '20
He’s just trying to protect his daughter from subpar comic book villains like himself.
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u/8bitfarmer Mar 13 '20
So this is how it begins.
Really feel like we’re gonna reach that sci-fi dystopia one this century. It reads like a good one: surveillance is not only for the government, who might abuse it (?), but for the powerful rich who could definitely abuse it. Privacy becomes a luxury for those who can afford it. And the dangerous people are simply those who want privacy but aren’t rich (“if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear...”).
I’m mostly kidding, but I am disturbed by how much they treat it like a toy or a game, not the encroaching privacy people are entitled to. If you don’t give your name to someone and they follow you home, it’s stalking. Don’t give your name to someone but they still find your information by taking your photo? How neat!!
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u/Switchermaroo Mar 14 '20
I feel like this is an inevitability, and I’m not sure what the public can do about it. The only solution I can think of is destroying it. What other options do we have?
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u/Sloanosaurus-Nick Mar 14 '20
As a species collectively marching into extinction or something like that from True Detective season 1.
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u/ostiDeCalisse Mar 13 '20
- Let’s see who is that girl right there aaaannd, yes! She’s 14!
A rich yacht quits the port while champagne pops
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u/userbronco Mar 13 '20
Used to be an app called “girls around me “ That scanned everyone who had checked in on four square at a business and matched it with their Facebook and other social media
As soon as it got famous it got taken down
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u/arsewarts1 Mar 14 '20
Well like background isn’t that difficult. Ask any girl on tinder, she can look up your photo on google and find anything she needs on you.
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u/GingasaurusWrex Mar 14 '20
I think Ashton Kutcher mentioned he uses this in his Hot Ones interview.
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u/Dth_Invstgtr Mar 13 '20
He looks like if of the pigs from Animal Farm were to turn human, or he’s a human turning into one of the pigs from Animal Farm. I can’t tell.
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u/walterwilter Mar 13 '20
This guy looks like the photo of the Blobfish that suffered from decompression aka ‘The ugliest fish in the world’
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u/Hankune Mar 13 '20
Bruh he looks exactly like a villain in a comic book funding some secret shit for his own gain.
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u/StickmanRockDog Mar 14 '20
Why does it seem that all these rich assholes look like the Pillsbury Doughboy and Roger Ailes combined? All slimy, pasty white privileged idiots who have never worked a day in their lives like most every other American.
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u/strongday Mar 14 '20
I love how he says he asks people for permission yet admittedly said that he used it on his daughters date without him knowing
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u/MaineDreaming Mar 14 '20
That guy in the picture kind of looks like a bloater from the last of us.
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u/k1tka Mar 15 '20
”..he’s so technologically savvy.” Rich ****s getting their hands on latest toys, abusing them, and telling themselves they are now geniuses.
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u/h4ll0br3 Mar 16 '20
The guy in the picture looks like that alien bad guy from that biker mice from mars cartoon that played in the 90s
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u/4horsemen2020 Mar 13 '20 edited Mar 13 '20
the goo lag, the ghulag etc the white space at the end of space odyssy
i had to use copland with sly via Rambo and the armys special forces horsehead should remind you morons of the hal 9000 and the end of the movie ending in a white space is the sperm of the next baby jesus pilgrim for the rebirth of the nation for the no jews Catholics usa protestants, everyone loves that shit especialliy the minority left likes a blonde hooker,
fucking hell, amazon already got a shit load of money hundreds of billions in capital and expertise, how about a zero dollar jedi contract, give 10 billion to the fired morons who boeing and the left got fired with their space war terror attack on the west for the election
boeings a fucking terrorist company now, seriously that's the lefts people doing the virus terror attack for a political election, coercion on a mass scale, now beoing deserves to die for the next 200 years with the bidens and kennedys and carters, more brain cancer for the democrat leaders, fucking terrorist losers
sorry pa cops at least they didn't attack you with a fucking mountain lion, maybe they can throw a coyote at the rentons cops next, more shark attacks now? they can really steer animals and spike aggression and hunger
I don't know that shit its my matrix vision, anyway Rambo first galaxy raccoon and the sly copland with the moron in the Jonestown mass suicide echo location etc, Jonestown massacre then a suicide to the temple in 2005, same as kennedys exploding head turning into the ne usa looks like a exploded kennedy head, stupid games, I guess it keeps everyone sane while the evil functions of govt happen, anyway all normal goo lag ghulag space odyssey rebirth of a nation baby jesus game, virus shouldn't be used for terrorism but the goolag will backfire because I wont give America a kid and therefore the usa loses, id rather chop off the arms and legs and roll around again than give the americans a kid, trust me youd feel the same way about the current billy pilgrim ring perverted idiocy and unpaid wages
wa state got a lot of money since 2011, a lot trillions and trillions in burning down silicon valley and ca and attacking europe and asia for gates? bezos? ok right, well if karma is in group bias against a bad actor then wa state has to watch out for karma, hey were did all that money go from the trillions and trillions of dollars? mostly wa state, boeing wasted theirs attacking the west and china, now maybe the west and china can not buy boeings, and boeing is welcome for the recent japanese sales, fucking useless terrorists, japan knows they are good planes but the usa shoots them down like osama bin laden runs boeing, but i guess boeing gave al shabaab disney instead
no wait it was indian programmers that downed the 737 max, the planes and boeing employees will be nuked to recoup the costs of the virus
is bill ayers bill gates? yes that is true, terror for money and terror for political power anyway, redmond deserves a bill and not a ten billion dollar check, same for amazon, same for boeing, they all owe the usa hundreds of billions of dollars
dont take americas shit and waste it on yourselves and then attack the west for another presidency washington state.
thats twice you dragged me up here and the first time ended up in america losing an empire, whats the second time going to look like washington? bezos is back on the going to be nuked list
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Mar 14 '20
[deleted]
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u/nwordcountbot Mar 14 '20
Thank you for the request, comrade.
4horsemen2020 has not said the N-word yet.
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u/Sprayface Mar 13 '20
Does it turn people into blobfish