Authorities Have Been Grabbing Your Facebook Selfies
Your selfies are being grabbed by police, FBI and at least 9 other federal agencies have been using them for a facial recognition data bank.
Most everyone by now has taken a selfie and posted it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, for their friends and the world to see. Authorities have swooped in at this public domain as well as a New York company called Clearview to build a massive database to track people they are looking for. Doesn't that seem scary as hell?
Clearview is not the only private company making money off of facial recognition technology but we will focus on them since since 10 federal agencies along with police forces right here in Michigan and around the country are using their services.
According to MLive, if you have a driver's license, you are already included in databases that are used by police agencies to identify potential suspects. If your privacy settings on your social media accounts are set to public, your selfies are in these databases as well.
Unfortunately there are few laws on the books to stop any of this from happening. So your photos have been used to build a facial recognition profile on you so if you do something wrong, if a camera picks you up, big brother(s) will know and come find you if you are a bad guy or bad girl.
The Michigan State Police use Clearview who have been mining these selfies from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google. There are plenty of cease and desist letters that have gone out to Clearview to stop using their systems but there are no laws that back up the big media companies complaints. Canada has banned Clearview and there are pending lawsuits in the U.S. and Europe.
So you know, you don't have to commit a crime to be a part of this massive database. Like I said earlier, if you have a driver's license you are in the database, if you posted a selfie on social media with a public account, you are in the database.
There is a problem with facial recognition technology, innocent people have been getting charged with crimes who didn't commit them. This has happened in Detroit, Farmington Hills and other locations right here in Michigan.
This technology is not new, this has been being used since 2001 and in Michigan alone there are 55 million photos in the database.
So next time you take a selfie and post it, just know you are going into a database, if not multiple databases somewhere where a file has been created about you.
Six of the Strangest Town Names in Michigan